EU could resume talks with Serbia without Mladic

Jul 13, 2006

By David Brunnstrom

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union could resume suspended talks with Serbia even without the arrest of Ratko Mladic if it finds Belgrade's plans to catch fugitive war crimes suspects convincing, EU diplomats said on Thursday.

Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica will present Serbia's plan to the EU on Monday on the sidelines of a EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, the diplomats said.

"If the plan is convincing, then there is a great readiness to restart the negotiations," said a senior EU diplomat, referring to talks suspended in May after Kostunica failed to meet a promise to deliver former Bosnian Serb military commander Mladic to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

"This could happen in September, but this depends on the positive assessment of the plan by the tribunal," the envoy said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Mladic is wanted for trial on genocide charges for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims. He is thought to be sheltered by elements in Serbian military intelligence.

A British official said the conditions for restarting the talks had always been interpreted as meaning delivering Mladic, when in fact the formal requirement was for Serbia to demonstrate "full cooperation" with the tribunal.

"If ... the Serbians are doing pretty much everything we can ask of them in terms of cooperating with the tribunal, it will be for foreign ministers to discuss if they are in fact meeting the criteria," the official said.

"It's a bit of a grey area and the action plan they put forward will have to be very, very convincing, but I think there is some room there and I imagine the UK, if we are content that they are doing enough, would want to be supportive of that."

"THERE HAVE TO BE RESULTS"

Asked if Mladic's handover was no longer a condition for resuming talks, a spokesman for Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, said: "We have not heard of any change of mind."

"Our position has always been: there have to be results."

Del Ponte complained at a commemoration of Srebrenica on Tuesday that she did not have the support of the West for Mladic's capture and Kostunica did not want to arrest him.

EU officials said this week they believed Kostunica had now committed himself to arresting Mladic rather than trying to arrange a voluntary surrender.

Since suspending talks on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the first step toward EU membership, the EU has been looking for ways to prevent hardline Serb nationalists reaping electoral dividends from the standoff. They hope Mladic can be in The Hague before possible early elections in November.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told Reuters on Monday discussions he had with Kostunica last week had been constructive and things were looking up.

He told a news conference in Helsinki on Thursday the EU could restart talks with Serbia "even at the same day when we see it in full co-operation with the Hague court."

(Additional reporting by Carsten Lietz and Mark John in Brussels, Emma Thomasson and Nicola Leske in The Hague and Tarmo Virki in Helsinki)