Serbia's Tadic in Berlin

Chancellor Angela Merkel met Friday with Serbian President Boris Tadic as part of a series of discussions with foreign leaders ahead of Germany's EU presidency starting in January.

Merkel said before the start of the meeting that she planned to raise the issue of Kosovo, a province in southern Serbia which has been under United Nations administration since 1999.

A decision is due next year on whether the predominantly Albanian-populated province should be given some form of independence -- a step which Serbia strongly opposes. Kosovo Albanians, who make up 90 percent of the small province's population, are demanding independence while Serbia is only prepared to grant them autonomy.

Merkel told Tadic that Germany was interested in having close relations with Serbia and was prepared to help bring it more in line with mainstream Europe.

War criminal prosecutions required

A condition for this was that Belgrade "cooperated well" with the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague that was prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, she said.

Tadic, a member of the pro-Western opposition Democratic Party, said Germany was "the key partner" for Serbia in Europe. Germany is a member of the Contact Group of foreign powers that has been overseeing peace in the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo since the 1998-1999 conflict.

The president also thanked Merkel for her support at this week's NATO summit in Latvia, which offered Serbia and its western Balkan neighbors Bosnia and Montenegro a "partnership for peace" (PFP) agreement with the alliance.

Delayed decision

Tadic's visit to Germany comes at a particularly sensitive moment for his country.

The UN's Kosovo mediator Martti Ahtisaari recently decided not to announce his plans for the future of the southern Serbian province until after the elections, which Tadic had called for Jan. 21.

The province has been run by a UN mission since 1999, when a NATO bombing campaign ended a crackdown by Belgrade on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

The Serbian parliament recently passed a new constitution -- backed by voters in a referendum -- that defined the province as an "integral" part of Serbia. But a final UN proposal is widely expected to grant Kosovo sovereignty.

A small step towards the EU membership

Responding to the "partnership for peace" agreement, which NATO leaders, grouped at a summit in the Latvian capital Riga, offered to Serbia on Wednesday, the Serbian president said in a statement that long reforms had paid off.

"It is excellent news for our citizens, the army and state," Tadic said.

Tadic admitted that Serbia still must arrest fugitive war crime suspects and bring them to justice at the ICTY.

Serbia's failure to arrest the suspects, most of all the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, prompted Brussels in May to suspend talks aimed at bringing Belgrade closer to EU membership.

ICTY head prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, who has been pressing the West to isolate Serbia over war crime fugitives, was disappointed with the decision in Riga, her spokesman said in The Hague.