Balkans stability "fundamental" to Europe - Solana

WIESBADEN, Germany, Mar 1 (Reuters) The European Union has a duty to ensure stability in the Balkans a decade after the ethnic wars of the 1990s and offer its peoples the hope of EU membership, the bloc's foreign policy chief today said.

Javier Solana said the 27-nation EU was pushing ahead with plans to deploy a robust police mission to Kosovo to replace a UN force due to leave, assuming the future of the breakaway Serbian province is resolved later this year.

Germany, hosting a meeting of EU defence ministers, defended the decision this week to begin winding down a European peace mission in Bosnia from 6,000 troops to 2,500 but was cautious about the timing of a complete pull-out.

''Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo belong to our continent and their stability is fundamental to us,'' Solana told a news conference after defence chiefs met in the city of Wiesbaden.

''We have an obligation to offer them a perspective to get closer to the European Union and eventually be members,'' he said, despite widespread enlargement fatigue in western Europe.

Both Serbia and Bosnia are seen as years away from EU membership. Serbian efforts to conclude an initial partnership with the bloc have been held up by Belgrade's failure to catch key war crime suspects, while the EU is disappointed with the speed of political and police reform in divided Bosnia.

Some EU states have started urging the bloc to soften the criteria for restarting talks with Belgrade on the partnership pact, but so far it has held back from such a move.

Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations since a NATO bombing campaign drove Serb forces out of the overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian province in 1999.

UN special envoy Martti Ahtisaari has made proposals setting Kosovo on the path to independence but Belgrade has rejected them and Serb ally Russia which holds a UN Security Council veto is against any imposed solution.

The EU hopes the future of the province can be sealed by a UN Security Council resolution around the middle of this year, and Solana said that when that happens, ''the European Union will have to play a role (in security)''.

NO NATO PULL-OUT Two people were killed in clashes between police and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo last month, and last week's bombing of three parked UN vehicles has underscored fears of unrest after the unveiling of plans for Kosovo's eventual independence.

The exact mandate and size of the EU's police mission tentatively set at 1,500 has yet to be confirmed, but EU officials said it should have the powers to carry out duties such as riot control.

Some NATO members want to wind down the alliance's separate 16,000-plus Kosovo peacekeeping mission, though they accept the troops must remain over the next months to avoid a security vacuum during the transition from UN to EU policing.

''In the context of these negotiations it would be completely the wrong signal to start talking about troop reductions in Kosovo,'' German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung insisted.

Jung said he had heard calls from Bosnian politicians for the EU to make a complete withdrawal by the end of next year, but he declined to put a date on departure.

''We need to look at how stability evolves in the region. We must not jeopardise what we have gradually built up over the years,'' he said.

Reuters SY VP0028