EU Says Croatia Must Apprehend Gotovina Before Talks Can Start

17/03/2005

Croatia's EU accession talks have been placed on hold because of a failure to co-operate fully with the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The EU made clear that fugitive indictee Ante Gotovina must be arrested and transferred to The Hague before the process can begin.

(Bloomberg, The Guardian, CNN - 16/3/05; Reuters, AFP - 15/03/05)

Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader holds a press conference after a final effort to convince the EU foreign affairs committee to launch accession talks, despite Ante Gotovina's fugitive status. [AFP]

EU foreign ministers announced on Wednesday (16 March) that accession talks with Croatia, scheduled to begin Thursday, would be postponed due to the country's failure to extradite Hague tribunal indictee, retired General Ante Gotovina. This is the first time the Union has delayed opening talks with a candidate country because of a human rights issue, and the move is seen as a signal to other former Yugoslav states as well as to Turkey.

"Croatia has to work harder than it has so far,'' Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told a news conference after chairing the meeting. "We didn't go down the road of setting a new date. The door is open for Croatia and it could be opened up in a month.''

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said the Union must reward countries that co-operate with the tribunal, and punish those that do not. "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. Letting Croatia begin talks without apprehending Gotovina would send an unclear message to those who have surrendered, such as former Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, he added.

Croatian officials insist that Gotovina is not in the country -- a claim repeated by Prime Minister Ivo Sanader during a last-ditch lobbying trip to Brussels. He said that his country has fulfilled the key EU criterion of full co-operation with the tribunal and that negotiations should start as planned.

But chief UN prosecutor Carla del Ponte insists Zagreb has not done enough to co-operate with her office.

"They do not convince me that everything is being done to locate this fugitive," del Ponte wrote in a letter sent Tuesday to Luxembourg, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

In two recent reports to the EU, she said that Gotovina -- who faces charges of killing 150 ethnic Serbs and expelling 150,000 others during a 1995 offensive against Serb forces -- was "within the reach of the Croatian authorities".

Opening accession talks requires a unanimous decision by the 25 EU member states. A handful of states -- including Austria, Hungary and Slovenia -- favoured starting talks on Thursday without Gotovina's surrender.

Croatia is generally thought to be better prepared economically than the existing candidates, Romania and Bulgaria. If it begins entry talks by the end of this year, it could still join by 2009 or 2010.