Defiant Serbia says it will be ready to join EU in 2012

Defiant Serbia says it will be ready to join EU in 2012By Tobias Buck and Fidelius Schmid in Brussels and Neil MacDonald, Balkans CorrespondentPublished: 20/8/2006 Last Updated: 20/8/2006 19:45 London Time
Serbia will be ready to join the European Union by 2012, the country's finance minister has said, sounding a defiant note even as Belgrade's fragile minority government faces collapse over its failure to capture Ratko Mladic, the fugitive war crimes suspect.
Pointing to the country's recent economic successes, Mladjan Dinkic told the Financial Times in an interview: "After one more term in government, we will be ready. By 2012 we will have fulfilled all the reforms."
Yet highlighting the immediate threats to Serbian political stability, Mr Dinkic also warned that he and his party would stand by their promise to leave the coalition government should pre-accession talks with Brussels remain frozen by the end of next month.
EU governments stopped the stabilisation talks – seen as Serbia's first step to eventual EU membership – in May, aiming to raise the pressure on Belgrade to seize Gen Mladic. Officials say Brussels is certain to continue this hard line, which means the government's future now depends on finding and capturing the Bosnian Serb wartime army commander in the next six weeks.
Vojislav Kostunica, the moderate nationalist prime minister, has held together a loose grouping of "democratic forces" against the extreme nationalist Radical party, which questions the need for EU integration and rejects co-operation with the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. The Radicals hold the largest single bloc in parliament and would still do so if new elections were held now, polls show.
EU diplomats say they would prefer the Kostunica government to keep its mandate until next year, after the United Nations resolves the status of Kosovo, the disputed southern Serbian province under UN administration since 1999.
Mr Dinkic admitted that Serbia "is going through a difficult phase. It would really be a bad moment for an election".
However, he insisted that he and his free-market-oriented G-17 Plus party would still pull out of the government unless the EU restarted Serbia's pre-entry process. "I am credible. The whole party decided that we could not stay in government if talks did not continue."
Mr Dinkic said Serbia was closing in on Gen Mladic, wanted by The Hague tribunal for his alleged role in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. "According to the information I receive the circle [of supporters] around Mladic is very narrow. There are only very few people, and it is not as organised as it was before," he said.
"We are confident that if we resolve this issue we can completely leave the past behind," Mr Dinkic added, suggesting that Gen Mladic's capture would pave the way for "fast track" EU accession as well as membership of Nato's Partnership for Peace programme before the end of the year.
The minister was in Brussels last week to call on the European Commission to increase its financial aid to Serbia, to intensify economic co-operation and lift the current visa requirements for Serbian citizens travelling to EU countries. Mr Dinkic and Ivana Dulic-Markovic, deputy prime minister, asked Brussels to raise the EU aid package for the next three years from the current €500m to €800m ($960m, £550m).
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