CROATIA: The European Union will not begin membership negotiations with Croatia until a high-level group has reported back on the level of the country's co-operation with the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Europe's leaders decided yesterday.
The EU has asked a team, which includes the EU's high representative Javier Solana and representatives of the European Commission, the United Kingdom, Austria and Luxembourg, to investigate. This follows the statement by the head of the war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, that Zagreb was not giving the court full co-operation in tracking down alleged war criminal General Ante Gotovina.
Gen Ante Gotovina is one of the tribunal's most wanted suspects, having commanded the Croatian army that captured the disputed Krajina region and its capital Knin from Serbia in 1995. About 150,000 Croatian Serbs fled or were driven from their homes, and some were massacred.
The Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, said yesterday that "preparations for negotiations with Croatia were being made". First, however, this high-level group would meet in Brussels and possibly also travel to Zagreb to assess the level of Croatia's co-operation. There is strong resistance in Croatian society to handing over Gen Gotovina. The authorities there say they do not known where he is.
The Government has been among those most supportive of Croatia, and the Taoiseach insisted yesterday that there was a lot of support for progressing Croatia's application.
"The view is we should be in a position to monitor the developments internally in Croatia. And whenever we get a satisfactory view that the monitoring is working and that Croatia are doing everything that they can, well, then we should be able to move forward quickly."
Meanwhile, Gen Vinko Pandurevic, a Bosnian Serb accused of involvement in the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, surrendered to the war crimes tribunal yesterday.
He was the 10th indicted suspect from Serbia or the Serb-run republic of Bosnia to hand himself over to the court since last November, after the respective governments in Belgrade and Banja Luka came under fierce diplomatic pressure to boost co-operation.
The two administrations said they had co-operated to negotiate Gen Pandurevic's surrender and praised his "moral and responsible decision in the interest of Republika Srpska and Serbia-Montenegro". Serbia's prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, refuses to capture the country's war crimes suspects, warning that it could destabilise a country where many of the fugitives are still widely seen as heroes. Instead, he has urged them to give up voluntarily, and is hoping for a better mark from the EU when it delivers its next progress report in April.