BELGRADE (Serbia), December 18 (SeeNews) – Serbia will formally apply next week to ultimately join the European Union, Reuters reported on Friday.
Serbia's "Council for EU Integration will soon recommend this to the government and we hope it (the government) will make the formal move early next week," Reuters quoted a Serbian government official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Balkan country made substantial progress towards EU accession with the signing of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) in April 2008 and with the arrest of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic in August 2008. But its progress to joining the bloc has been hindered by the government’s failure to arrest fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes indictee General Ratko Mladic.
The Hague tribunal indicted Mladic and Karadzic for genocide in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim males were murdered and buried in mass graves in 1995 in one of the worst killings of civilians in Europe after the World War II, and for masterminding the siege of Bosnian capital Sarajevo in which more than 10,000 people lost their lives.
U.N. prosecutor Serge Brammertz said earlier this month that Serbia was co-operating more efficiently in the search for Mladic.