EU's Solana in Belgrade to press for arrest of Mladic

Jul 13, 2009, 12:20 GMT

Belgrade - The European Union's top diplomat Javier Solana arrived in Belgrade Monday, kicking off a four-capital tour of former Yugoslavia to discuss their countries' troubled EU membership bids.

Solana is expected to press Serbian officials for the arrest of the remaining two fugitive war crime suspects wanted by the UN tribunal in The Hague, which is a condition Belgrade must meet to unblock its accession process.

The EU has signed a stabilization and association agreement with Serbia - a crucial step of a country toward membership - in 2008, but immediately suspended it over Belgrade's reluctance to bring war criminals to justice.

The two fugitives are the Serb leader of an insurgency in Croatia, Goran Hadzic and the much better known and more wanted Bosnian Serb Ratko Mladic, wanted for atrocities such as the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

Solana was also set to discuss Kosovo, a former Serbian province with an ethnic-Albanian majority which declared unilateral independence last year with support from the West, principally the United States and a majority of EU nations.

The EU has sent a law-enforcing mission to Kosovo to help it build state institutions, but now wants more support from Belgrade. Serbia however maintains a claim of property over the province and remains hostile to efforts aimed at institution-building in Kosovo.

After talks in Belgrade, Solana was on Monday and Tuesday set to visit Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro.