EU welcomes Bosnia bid to join, but warns of long road ahead

(BRUSSELS) - The European Union on Friday welcomed Bosnia's efforts toward joining the bloc but indicated that conditions were not yet ripe to start on the long road to integration.

EU President Herman Van Rompuy, who met Bosnian Prime Minister Vjekoslav Bevanda, congratulated him on setting up a government after 16 months of political crisis.

"With a new government in place, Bosnia and Hercegovina can now move forward with reforms and to achieve real progress in the EU integration," he said.

"Political and economic reforms -- adopting, implementing and enforcing laws -- remain central on the path to the EU," he said, stressing that the bloc remained committed to integrating the whole of the western Balkans.

"The EU welcomes the recent positive developments, including the adoption of state aid law and the law on census. At the same time, we hope that Bosnia and Hercegovina will step up efforts on the remaining issues," he said.

Bosnia is to hold a census in April 2013, two years after all other countries in the region have done so.

Its last census, conducted in 1991 when Bosnia was still a part of Yugoslavia, found that it had 4.4 million inhabitants, of whom 43.7 percent were Muslims, 31.4 percent Serbs and 17.3 Croats.

However, the 1992-1995 war led to significant demographic change.

It cost some 100,000 lives, while 2.2 million people were forced to flee their homes, moving mostly to regions within the country controlled by their own ethnic group.

The war left Bosnia split into two semi-independent entities -- the Serbs' Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation -- each with its own government.

Population data are needed notably so that Bosnia can receive aid provided by the EU to its future members.

Bevanda recently said Sarajevo wanted to ask for the opening of membership negotiations with the EU this year.

Of the six states which formed the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia joined the EU in 2004, while Croatia is set to join the 27-nation bloc in 2013. Macedonia and Serbia have been granted candidate status, while Montenegro should soon enter into membership negotiations.