EU delay membership negotiations with Croatia

The European Union will delay the opening of membership talks with Croatia at least until March, giving Zagreb three months to bring an indicted war criminal to justice, sources said today.

For membership talks to open, they said, Croatia must show it was co-operating with the war crimes tribunal by handing Gen. Ante Gotovina to the UN court in The Hague.

The EU leaders were expected to agree to open membership talks with Croatia at a summit meeting on Thursday and Friday.

However, speaking outside an EU foreign ministers meeting today, officials said Croatia’s lack of co-operation in hunting down Gotovina has made that impossible.

The delay until March means “that by then, of course, we need to know if Croatia is co-operating with the war crimes tribunal,” said an EU diplomat, who asked not to be named.

The implication is that there could be a further delay unless Croatia is seen to be co-operating with the tribunal.

Chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte has long complained that Croatia and other Balkan nations did not do enough to find and arrest indicted criminals from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has charged Gotovina with masterminding the killings of about 150 ethnic Serbs and the expulsions of 150,000 others during a 1995 Croatian offensive to recapture lands seized by Serb rebels in the 1991 war that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia.

He is the only Croatian war crimes suspect publicly being sought by the tribunal.

The government in Zagreb maintains Gotovina is no longer in Croatia, but Western nations and Del Ponte dispute that.

Del Ponte has also said Bosnia-Herzegovina does too little to bring fugitives, including former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, to justice.

Croatia applied for EU membership in February 2003.

While the country has made good progress in political and economic reforms, its perceived lack of cooperation with the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal has long been a sore point in relations between the EU and Zagreb.

The EU head office declared Croatia fit for entry negotiations last April, calling it “a functioning democracy with stable institutions guaranteeing the rule of law. There are no major problems regarding the respect of fundamental rights.”