EU to send Bosnia 'wake-up call' Monday

(BRUSSELS) - The European Union plans to send Bosnia a "wake-up call" next week as Sarajevo struggles to implement EU-oriented reforms and with nationalism on the rise, the bloc's French presidency said Friday.

EU defence ministers, meeting in Brussels Monday, are also expected to maintain the bloc's peacekeeping force in Bosnia until there is a return to political stability.

"There will be a wake-up call sent by the ministers that things are not going well on the political front," a presidency diplomat said. EU foreign ministers will also evaluate Bosnia's reform progress Monday.

Bosnia's hopes of one day joining the EU "are not compatible with provocation and calls of a more or less disguised ethnic nature," the diplomat said, on condition of anonymity.

"This is not what we expect from this country," she said.

Bosnia's three-and-a-half-year war, which started in 1992, was sparked by ethnic tensions and left at least 100,000 people dead and more than two million homeless, with the EU failing to prevent the carnage.

The bloc had been hoping to wind down its peacekeeping mission there -- dubbed Althea -- but the simmering political tensions has forced a rethink.

Althea, launched in 2004, numbers around 2,200 troops and is charged with military tasks under the Dayton peace deal that ended the 1992-1995 war. Military officers insist it has essentially finished its job.

The Dayton agreement split Bosnia into two semi-independent entities -- the Serbian Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- yet left them united by weak central institutions.

Althea conducts training, de-mining and air traffic control activities, as well as monitoring military movements, particularly around weapons arsenals.

Security has improved markedly in recent years, and the capture of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is on trial for genocide, has further helped foster stability.

According to the diplomat, the EU high representative in Bosnia Miroslav Lajcak has said that the force is still needed "to stabilise the situation".

Bosnian politics have been tense since 2006 elections propelled into office two key figures -- Haris Silajdzic, the Muslim member of the country's tripartite presidency, and Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Milorad Dodik.

Dodik has warned that the Serb Republic could secede while Silajdzic has called for the Serb entity to be abolished.

EU officials have urged Bosnia's fractious ethnic communities to calm their nationalist declarations in recent weeks.

"Nationalist rhetoric from political leaders from all the constituent peoples, challenging the Dayton peace agreement and, thus, the constitutional order, remained commonplace," the European Commission said Wednesday.

"The most frequent challenges came from the political leadership of Republika Srpska, who have continued to claim the right of self-determination," it said in a report on progress Bosnia has made on EU-oriented reform.

In a draft statement prepared for Monday's meeting in Brussels, the ministers will express "deep concern about the evolution of the political situation" in Bosnia, and in particular the rise in "nationalist rhetoric".