The Serb negotiating team in talks on Kosovo's status on Friday asked Ahtisaari to explain his statement that Serbs were guilty as a nation given to Serb negotiators at the August 8 meeting in Vienna. The team also warned the UN diplomat that such statements brought into question his impartiality in the talks.
Ahtisaari's answer provoked a series of comments on Saturday. "Before Ahtisaari, only Hitler dared say that a nation is guilty. Racism and hatred towards the Serb people cannot be tolerated," said the spokesman for the Democratic Party of Serbia, Andreja Mladenovic.
Aleksandar Vucic, a senior official of the Serb Radical Party, said that "Ahtisaari's statement shows that there will be no serious, principled talks respecting international public law, but rather talks about political appropriateness and opportunism, with clear intent to snatch Kosovo."
Serbian Justice Minister Zoran Stojkovic said that he did not believe that "somebody will allow the amputation of a part of territory regardless of weird speculations and the fact that force rather than the law dominates the international community".
The head of the Humanitarian Law Fund, Natasa Kandic, believes that it is good that Ahtisaari has drawn the attention of the Serbian public and its political elites to the fact that "those who come to power after war-time authorities take over the historical obligation of assuming responsibility for the evil deeds of their predecessors".
The Serbian national TV network quoted the head of the government's office for relations with the media, Ivan Djuric, who told Fonet news agency that "the UN did not give Joachim Ruecker the mandate to fantasize about independent Kosovo".
Djuric was commenting on Ruecker's interview with the German paper Die Welt, in which he said that the international community had envisaged three conditions for Kosovo's final status - no return to the status before 1999, no integration with neighbouring countries and no division of the province.
"I won't speculate about independence. But those who keep in mind those three givens can calculate the result," Ruecker said.
Belgrade daily Danas reported that Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica had announced that the Serbian parliament could start its autumn session with a new resolution or declaration on Kosovo.
The daily reports that this will be an opportunity to confirm that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia before consultations on Kosovo's decentralisation in the UN Security Council, scheduled for September.
Kostunica also said that this position would be indicated in the new Serbian constitution and that the issue of Kosovo "is not only a question of territory, but a question of Serbia's dignity".