Serbia warns Washington drop Kosovo ''NATO state''

BELGRADE, Aug 16 (Reuters) Serbia says the United States must abandon an alleged plan to turn the breakaway province of Kosovo into a ''NATO state'' if it wants normal relations in future.

In the latest attack on Western support for Kosovo's independence, Interior Minister Dragan Jocic today said Washington ''must give up the dangerous experiment that started with (the) illegal and ruthless destruction of our country''.

Jocic was speaking to state news agency Tanjug, which has quoted a number of government officials this week accusing NATO allies -- Washington in particular -- of plotting to seize Serb territory illegally for their own purposes.

Led by the United States, NATO bombed strategic targets in Serbia for 78 days in 1999, forcing the late autocrat Slobodan Milosevic to pull his troops from Kosovo. Thousands were killed there in a counter-insurgency war.

The allies say this intervention, after Milosevic refused to heed months of warnings to stop the slaughter, prevented Serbia from completing a ruthless plan to expel Kosovo's two million ethnic Albanians, 90 per cent of the population.

Kosovo is currently run by the United Nations and patrolled by a peacekeeping force of 16,000 troops led by NATO.

Serbia insists on maintaining its legal sovereignty over the land and is offering the people wide autonomy, but not a share in governing Serbia as equal citizens.

It foresees NATO and a European Union supervisory mission staying on ''for up to 20 years'' to ensure stability -- a prospect the Western allies and the United Nations dismiss as out of touch with reality.

But Serbia has acquired Russian backing for its opposition to Kosovo Albanian demands for independence, and Moscow has forced the US and its European Union allies to mediate a further round of talks in search of a compromise solution.

The first round is expected later this month. But in the meantime, Belgrade is warning that Serbia will walk away from future NATO and European Union membership if Kosovo is allowed to secede with Western backing.

Serbia's coalition government, led by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of the nationalist Democratic Party of Serbia, also warns any country which decides to recognise Kosovo as independent that relations with Belgrade will suffer.

REUTERS SV VV1646