Serbia's Orthodox Church warned against a 'betrayal' of Kosovo, piling pressure on the ruling coalition as it weighs whether to cede the country's last foothold in its former province in exchange for talks on joining the European Union, reports Reuters.
The appeal by the patriarch comes before a Tuesday deadline for the government to tell the EU whether it accepts a plan to tackle Kosovo's ethnic partition between its Albanian majority and a small northern pocket populated by Serbs.
Serbia considers Kosovo, steeped in history and myth, the cradle of the Serb nation and its Orthodox Christian faith.
But Albanians are its 90-percent majority, many of them Muslims. They broke away in war in 1998-99 and Kosovo finally declared independence in 2008, but Serbia still has a fragile hold on a northern pocket where some 50,000 Serbs live.
Rejection of the plan could cost Serbia a coveted place at talks on joining the EU, a process that would drive reform and help lure investors to the struggling Serbian economy, the biggest in the former Yugoslavia.
