Serbia might have to wait for EU candidacy after 2012: EU

(BELGRADE) - Serbia might have to wait longer than expected after 2012 to obtain EU candidacy status, the head of a EU delegation said in an interview published Sunday.

"This is one of the three possible scenarios, but it should not be excluded. Everything is now in Serbia's hands... We are limited with time, it is already mid-March," Vincent Degert, head of the EU delegation to Serbia, told the Belgrade daily Blic.

Serbia applied for EU membership in December 2009 but won support for the bid only after agreeing last September to start a dialogue with its breakaway province of Kosovo.

Degert said that the European Commission's opinion on the candidacy status was expected in October, a year after the European Union agreed to examine Belgrade's application to join the bloc.

But in return EU has demanded Belgrade's stepped-up cooperation with the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and renewed efforts to bring in suspected Balkans war criminals.

"I hope that Serbia's government will be very dynamic in the coming time," Degert said in an interview published in Serbian.

He added that Serbia's candidacy status might be conditioned on its implementation of wide-range reforms and urged Belgrade to show its "readiness" for it.

"It is not impossible, but we are aware that Serbia needs not only internal reforms, but also in the foreign (policy) issues, notably the cooperation with the ICTY," Degert said.

Belgrade say it is doing its utmost to locate and arrest two remaining war crimes fugitives, Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic and Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, both wanted by the ICTY.

Mladic is accused of masterminding the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left 10,000 people dead and the massacre in July 1995 of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

Serbia and the United States have offered a 19-million-dollar reward for information leading to his arrest.

Hadzic is wanted for the murder of thousands of Croatian civilians between 1991 and 1993. There are rewards of up to 1.4 million dollars offered for his arrest.

In January, the European Parliament ratified a key Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Belgrade, seen as the first step towards EU membership.

So far, 17 EU member countries have ratified the agreement.