EU should start membership talks with Serbia: commission

PanARMENIAN.Net - The European Union should start membership talks with Serbia, the bloc's executive arm recommended on Monday, April 22, the last big hurdle the former pariah state had to pass before the EU's 27 governments rule on opening the negotiations in June, Reuters reported.

Accession talks with Serbia could begin within the year, providing Belgrade makes progress with an historic accord struck last week to resolve relations with its former province of Kosovo.

The process would help drive reform in the largest country to emerge from federal Yugoslavia, luring investors to its ailing economy.

EU governments will rule on the European Commission recommendation in late June, a few days before the bloc takes in Croatia, Serbia's neighbor and foe during the wars that led to the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In its recommendation, the European Commission said Belgrade had met a key condition of visible and sustainable improvement in relations with Kosovo, which broke away from Serbia in a war in 1999 and declared independence with Western backing in 2008.

Racing to clinch accession talks, Serbia last week agreed to cede its last foothold in Kosovo, in a pact aimed at ending the ethnic partition of the young country between its Albanian majority and a pocket of some 50,000 Serbs in the north.

The north Kosovo Serbs have threatened to resist integration with the rest of Kosovo, in a region bristling with weapons and deep animosity. Some 5,000 Serbs protested in the divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica on Monday.

But Western diplomats still want to see progress on the issue before June.

"Implementation will not be entirely easy, but I think the Rubicon has been crossed," said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, a former United Nations and EU envoy in the region. "There is no way back," he said.