EU delays Croatia talks over war suspect
BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The European Union will postpone entry talks with Croatia due to have started this week after a U.N. war crimes prosecutor said Zagreb had not done enough to arrest a top fugitive, diplomats said on Tuesday.
EU president Luxembourg will tell a meeting of the bloc's foreign ministers on Wednesday that by failing to capture or hand over war crimes indictee General Ante Gotovina, Croatia had not met EU conditions for starting negotiations.
"It will be a 'no' tomorrow, but the question is how it will be formulated," one EU diplomat said after ambassadors of the 25-nation bloc met to prepare the decision.
It will be the first time the EU has put off the scheduled opening of negotiations with a candidate country because of a human rights issue, sending a powerful signal to other former Yugoslav states and to EU aspirant Turkey.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told journalists: "The message we are sending to the region is that you have a real concrete European future ahead of you... but that requires that each and every country will have to fulfil its international obligations, especially those related to the rule of law, which is the most fundamental European value."
An EU ambassador said most member states favoured setting no new date for Croatia but expressing readiness to open talks whenever it is in full compliance with the tribunal.
Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, on a last-ditch lobbying trip to Brussels, insisted his country had fulfilled the key EU criterion of full cooperation with the U.N. tribunal and negotiations should start on Thursday as planned.
He said Gotovina, seen by many Croatians as a hero of their 1991-95 war of independence, was not in Croatia.
But chief U.N. prosecutor Carla del Ponte told Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn in the Hague that Zagreb had not tried hard enough to catch him.
"There is no change in our assessment of cooperation. The authorities are not demonstrating the will to arrest Gotovina," Del Ponte's spokeswoman, Florence Hartmann, told Reuters.
Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller told reporters it was vital to establish the precedent that countries that cooperated with the Hague tribunal were rewarded and those that did not were punished.
"If you say well it's not that important, it will be difficult to demand continued efforts to hunt down (Ratko) Mladic and (Radovan) Karadzic," Moeller said, referring to the former Bosnian Serb military commander and president who are the top two war crimes suspects still on the run.
Letting Croatia off the hook on Gotovina would make a mockery of "well-behaved people" who had surrendered, such as Kosovo's former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, he said.
Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic, on a visit to Brussels, said his country had understood the signal.
"We understood that message very clearly that Serbia and Montenegro cannot even think about ... approaching the European Union till transferring to the Hague all the indictees including General Mladic," he told reporters.
Del Ponte has sent the EU two damning reports in the past five weeks, accusing Croatia of double-dealing, obstructing her efforts and not trying seriously to catch Gotovina.
Opening talks requires a unanimous decision by the 25 member states, and diplomats said a big majority opposed making a start until Gotovina was in The Hague.
Only five of Croatia's neighbours -- Austria, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia and Slovakia -- favoured starting talks on Thursday without his surrender. A larger group including Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Nordic states argued it would set a dangerous precedent.
