Serbia expects reward from EU

Following Kardzic arrest, integration process ‘should be speeded up,’ says President Boris Tadic

EU hopes. President Boris Tadic, seen here in a file photograph, hopes to accelerate Serbia’s integration into the European Union.

BELGRADE (AFP) - Serbian leaders will press the EU to hasten the country's integration into the bloc, President Boris Tadic said yesterday on the eve of their first visit to Brussels after Radovan Karadzic's arrest.

«It is very important that. .. we go to Brussels and dissect what has been done and what should be done. .. making a roadmap on how Serbia can become an EU member as soon as possible,» Tadic said in an interview broadcast by B92 television.

«We cannot do without Europe and therefore all processes should be speeded up, including the implementation of the trade agreement,» he said in reference to an accord on closer ties signed with the EU in April.

Along with Tadic, the delegation travelling to Brussels today includes Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic, Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic and the deputy prime minister for EU integration, Bozidar Djelic.

It is the highest-ranking Serbian delegation to go to Brussels in recent years, and the first such trip there since a new West-leaning government came to power in Belgrade on July 7.

One of the first acts of the government was to order the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic, who was captured in the Serbian capital Belgrade in late July, 13 years after he was indicted for war crimes.

That was followed by a decision to reinstate Belgrade's ambassadors withdrawn from European capitals that have recognized the independence of the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo.

The Serbian government hopes to get European Union candidacy by early next year and to win full membership by 2014.

So far, it has only signed the EU's Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA), seen as a first step on the long road to membership.

«Our delegation's main argument (for faster EU integration) will certainly be the arrest of Radovan Karadzic,» a Serbian source was quoted as telling the daily Blic yesterday.

Tadic alluded to this, saying that Serbia could no longer come in for criticism that it was stalling on cooperation with the UN court after having transferred Karadzic to The Hague.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The Czech Republic expects to move EU membership talks with Croatia into the last lap during its presidency of the European Union in the first half of next year, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra said yesterday.

«We expect to move the talks with at least Croatia to the final stage,» Vondra told a news conference in Brussels. «I believe 2009 should be the year Croatia is going to complete accession talks,» he said.

The former Yugoslav state is at the front of the queue of countries wishing to join the 27-nation bloc and hopes to finally accede in 2010 or 2011.

The Commission, the EU's executive arm, has said it hopes to give Croatia a road map in November for completing negotiations before November 2009. Zagreb has said it hopes to conclude the talks before that date.

Before that, it needs to step up the fight against widespread corruption, reform its judiciary, state administration and economy and privatize loss-making shipyards. So far Croatia has opened 21 of the 35 so-called «chapters,» or negotiating areas, and closed three of them.

France is the current holder of the six-month EU presidency and will pass the baton to the Czech Republic on Jan 1, 2009. The presidency chairs EU business and has leeway to decide which policies to push hardest on.

Vondra said other priorities of the Czech presidency would include energy security and diversification of its imports, which he said had become more important after the conflict between Georgia and Russia, the European Union's major energy supplier.

BANJA LUKA (AFP) - Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik warned yesterday that Bosnia could break apart if Muslim leaders questioned the existence of his entity, a local weekly reported.

«Republika Srpska (RS) is being challenged by the Muslim political elite,» Dodik told the Fokus weekly. «We are facing attacks on a daily basis by officials of Bosnia's Islamic religious community and their conception on how to annul RS.»

«Many in the former Yugoslavia wanted the country to (continue existing) but it broke apart since some were belittling others,» Dodik said.

In the early 1990s, four of the former Yugoslavia's six republics - Bosnia, Croatia, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia - proclaimed independence, leaving Serbia and Montenegro together until 2006.

The 1991 proclamation of independence by Croatia and a year later by Bosnia, opposed by ethnic Serbs, were followed by wars which claimed some 20,000 and 100,000 lives respectively.

«We do not want any imposed project» regarding Bosnia, Dodik said, stressing that Serbs backed the Dayton peace accords which «clearly made a balance.» «Such a Bosnia-Herzegovina can function.»

Bosnia's two halves share weak central institutions while each has its own government and police. Serbs strongly oppose any strengthening of central institutions, sought by the international community to make the country more functional, at the expense of their entity's autonomy.