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SAARISELKA, Finland, Sept 4 (AFP) - European Union foreign ministers will make concrete proposals this month for lifting the oil and flight embargoes on Kosovo and Montenegro, it was announced here Saturday.
"We are due to make proposals at the next General Affairs Council to see that both Kosovo and Montenegro are exempted from the maintained flight ban and oil ban as such," Hans van den Broek, European Commission for eastern and central Europe, told an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Kosovo and Montenegro "should not be affected by that. So now that the council (the 15 foreign ministers) has agreed on certain formulas, we can proceed," he told a press conference in this Lapland retreat in the far north of Finland, which holds the current EU presidency.
Finnish Foreign Minister Tarja Halonen said the exemptions for Kosovo and Montenegro would be formalized at the council's official meeting on September 13.
She added: "We will need the full cooperation of the authorities of Kosovo and Montenegro to assure that this in no way serves the Serbian government.
Van den Broek said the commission was endeavoring to "underpin what the council is trying to do, to give signals to Serbia that we are not in fact looking to affect the population there, that we have not been in a war with the population.
"It is the government and its practices and political leadership which are in fact unacceptable for the European Union," he added.
He said the commission was also looking at the possibility of assisting municipalities "which are of good color so to speak," referring to their political leadership.
"That is a very complicated affair, because all kinds of damages which relate to energy or electricity need at least the condoning of the national government...And the last thing we want to do is help the leadership in Serbia."
Most oil destined for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) transits through Montenegran ports, and the decision to lift the embargo would have to be accompanied by "surveillance mechanisms" aimed at preventing the oil arriving in Montenegro from being sidetracked to Serbia, with the exception of Kosovo, sources said.
It remains to the European Commission to formulate the nuts and bolts of a lifting of the embargo in a way that would not benefit the regime of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, an EU source said earlier in the week.
The oil embargo was imposed a month after the start of the 11-week NATO bombing campaign on Yugoslavia aimed at forcing a halt to ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
The EU foreign ministers, meeting here informally Saturday and Sunday, also said they wanted to invite Serbian opposition figures to Brussels in an expression of support, but were nonspecific on when or how.
"We feel we should not support any individual opposition figures, but the democratic values that they respect," said Halonen.
The meeting also voiced concern about organized crime in Kosovo spreading to Western Europe, but were uncertain how to deal with it.
"It is becoming a bigger and bigger problem, and the ways of effectively fighting it on an international level are limited," said a Finnish source.
"Some ministers thought there should be better control within Kosovo, but also on the Albanian border. They thought the EU, in relations with Albania, should implement some stronger conditionality on the fight against organized crime."