According to data provided by the Fund, "between June 1999 and December 2000 a large number of Serbs.. more than 1,000, disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and as many were killed."
"The attitude of Albanians at the time... was that the international community actually accepted such a way of regulating relations between Serbs and Albanians, so this created an impression and fear among ordinary people that the international community actually approved of how Albanians were treating Serbs," the Belgrade-based television and radio network B92 quoted Kandic as saying to Voice of America on Tuesday.
Kandic believes that the poor position of Kosovo Serbs can be improved through their integration, but that there are many obstacles to that process.
"First of all, Serbia, which has territorial access to Kosovo, is not interested in Kosovo Serbs at all, it only wants to use them to keep some kind of control over a part of Kosovo's territory. Secondly, integration is not a priority for (the UN chief negotiator for Kosovo's status) Martti Ahtisaari, and the third limiting factor is that the Albanian community and Kosovo institutions do not see that their most important card is creating mechanisms and channels for the integration of Serbs," Kandic said.
"When we talk about minority rights, the international community was not enough determined and clear about what it wanted with minorities and how it would implement clearly defined minority rights from numerous international documents. Temporary institutions did not deal with that problem either, so minority rights remained a tricky issue until the negotiation process was launched," Kandic said.