PRISTINA, Serbia-Montenegro, Feb 22 (AFP) - The Kosovo government on Tuesday agreed to provisional changes to municipal boundaries which will give ethnic minorities, including Serbs, more say over their own affairs.

Five new municipalities were created in the mainly ethnic Albanian southern Serbian province, including two in the ethnic Serb enclaves of Gracanica and Partes and one in an area populated mainly by the Bosniak minority, officials said.

Local Affairs Minister Lutfi Haziri said the municipalities would be allowed to govern until the next local elections, which are expected in the second half of 2005. A decision would then be made whether to make them permanent.

"If the project succeeds the new municipalities will have the right to take part independently in local elections in 2005," he said.

"The current municipalities will keep all the attributes they have, while the new units will have regulatory power to allow citizens to get services without having to go far from their residences."

The large ethnic Serb minority in Kosovo, which has been under UN administration since 1999, lives mainly in scattered enclaves surrounded by hostile ethnic Albanians, who demand independence from Serbia.

The Serbian government in Belgrade has been calling for greater autonomy for the Serb communities since the end of the 1998-1999 war between Serbian security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

But prominent Gracanica-based Serb politician Rada Trajkovic told AFP the "pilot project" had been foisted on the minority community without consultation, and would only affect two out of at least a dozen Serb enclaves in Kosovo.

"Every solution which is not a result of negotiations with Kosovo Serbs is an imposed one," she said, adding: "Experiments are not the way for this problem to be resolved".

"Decentralization has to offer a solution for all Serbs. It cannot be done by two pilot projects only."

Kosovo's main ethnic Albanian opposition parties have strongly opposed decentralization, saying any step toward greater autonomy will encourage Serbs to seek the province's division along ethnic lines.

But Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, a former ethnic Albanian guerrilla commander, said the new municipalities "will not lead to cantonization or partition in any way."

Like all Kosovo municipalities, the new electoral regions will not have responsibility for security or the courts, which will continue to be functions of the central authorities in Pristina.

Serbia stepped up its demands for greater Serb autonomy in Kosovo after NATO peacekeepers failed to stop violent anti-Serb riots which engulfed the province for three days in March last year.

Some 200,000 Serbs have fled Kosovo since the UN took control, fearing reprisal attacks from ethnic Albanians, and the 80,000 who remain live in small communities with limited freedom of movement due to security fears.