EU-Serbia talks to resume after fugitive arrest

By Louis Charbonneau

BERLIN (Reuters) - The European Union will resume partnership talks with Serbia, probably this month, after a Bosnian Serb general accused of genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnia war was delivered to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Zdravko Tolimir was arrested on Thursday and flown to the Netherlands from the Bosnian capital Sarajevo on Friday.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told reporters in Berlin that Belgrade had demonstrated a "clear commitment to full cooperation" with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.

"On the basis of very careful and extensive assessment, the Commission can resume the negotiations on the Stabilization and Association Agreement," Rehn said after meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Serbian President Boris Tadic.

He said a firm date for talks would be set after chief United Nations war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte returned from Belgrade, where she is due to travel on Monday.

"I expect this date of the first round of negotiations will be indeed in June," Rehn said.

Tolimir, 58, was arrested on the border between Serbia and Bosnia's Serb Republic in a joint operation by NATO and the EU peacekeeping force EUFOR.

During the 1992-95 Bosnia war, the former general was a close aide of former Bosnian Serb Army commander Ratko Mladic.

He is alleged to have helped Mladic plan and execute the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, an event which U.N. courts have classed as genocide.

Del Ponte's spokeswoman said the prosecutor would meet Serbia's president and prime minister and would provide the EU and U.N. Security Council with a full report on her trip.

Rehn said it was unlikely del Ponte would come back with a negative assessment.

"Next week I hope to persuade the chief Hague prosecutor that she can recommend the resumption of negotiations on the SAA in good conscience," Tadic told reporters in Berlin.

FROZEN NEGOTIATIONS

The so-called Stabilization and Association Agreement negotiations were frozen a year ago after Belgrade failed to keep a promise to arrest Mladic, indicted on genocide charges.

The EU decision to relaunch talks comes at a sensitive time because major powers are wrangling over the final status of the breakaway Serbian province of Kosovo, in limbo under U.N. rule since NATO waged an air war in 1999 to drive out Serbian forces.