Pusić: We want SEE countries to progress and assume European model

(Hina) - Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusić announced on Wednesday that she would travel to Belgrade next week for a summit between the Chinese prime minister and the leaders of 16 Central and East European countries

(Hina) - Croatian Foreign Minister Vesna Pusić announced on Wednesday that she would travel to Belgrade next week for a summit between the Chinese prime minister and the leaders of 16 Central and East European countries.

The meeting was to have been attended by Croatian PM Zoran Milanović, but he cancelled after Croatia-Serbia relations cooled down because of the warmongering rhetoric of war crimes indictee Vojislav Šešelj after this Serbian politician was provisionally released by the UN tribunal in The Hague.

Pusić made the announcement at the third annual conference of Croatian ambassadors at which she spoke about the results and future guidelines of Croatia's foreign policy.

Responding to a question from the press, she said "there will be no bilateral meetings (at the Belgrade summit on December 16) because it's the turn of my colleague, the Serbian foreign minister, to visit Croatia" next year.

She said the Belgrade summit was a meeting with the Chinese as well as an opportunity to show the need "to advance regional cooperation and not push it backwards."

She said "the entire recent difficulty (because of Šešelj) came about because of a decision by the Hague tribunal and not the Serbian government." She said "an additional element was the fact that the Serbian authorities did not clearly distance themselves" from Šešelj's rhetoric when he returned to Serbia after the tribunal provisionally released him on medical grounds.

Pusić said that had prompted Croatia to write to the Hague tribunal and the UN, adding that the chief of the Croatian mission to the UN, Vladimir Drobnjak, was talking about it at the UN today as part of a discussion on the tribunal's work.

Other outstanding issues with Serbia, aside from the Šešelj case, include the people gone missing in the war and the border, Pusić said, stressing that relations with the neighbours in the region were of vital interest to Croatia.

Croatia is part of three regions, the Mediterranean, Central Europe, and Southeast Europe, "and the last one is our priority," she said.

"Southeast Europe is kind of an unfinished European project... in which we, to a great extent, are responsible and vitally interested in the countries of this region making progress on the European path and assuming the European model as their own model," Pusić said, adding that this was important to Croatia "absolutely and primarily for security reasons" because it wanted "stable states" on its borders.

Regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), she reiterated that Croatia's initiative for bringing BiH closer to European Union membership had become the EU's new policy on BiH.

Pusić said Croatia and Montenegro intensively cooperated in European projects and that a big topic was the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas in the Adriatic Sea. "Until the border issue is settled, the economy ministers are discussing how to explore and exploit gas."

Regarding Slovenia, she said an arbitration tribunal was expected rule on the border by next summer and that the decision would be binding for both parties.

As for possible lawsuits announced yesterday by Slovenian PM Miro Cerar because of Croatian companies' debts to Slovenia's Ljubljanska Banka, Pusić said this did not concern the Croatian state but its companies.

Asked about the possibility of Croatia recognising Palestine, she said Croatia would coordinate its policy together with the EU. She said European institutions were discussing recognition and that Croatia would make a decision "certainly in consultation with the European partners and the European foreign affairs service. This is frequently being discussed there, also as a result of Sweden's recognition of Palestine. This discussion has been launched in parliaments in numerous European member states, but for now the governments are not heading in that direction."

Pusić went on to say that a big topic in EU countries was citizens going to Syria and Iraq to fight for Islamic State. "At this moment Croatia has no fighters among the extremists. There are four young women who married those people," she said, adding that this year Croatia became part of a coalition against Islamic State and that the coalition, comprising about 60 states, held its first official meeting in Brussels last week.

Regarding Ukraine, Pusić reiterated that the European sanctions were joint sanctions and that Croatia abided by them, but that one should not shut down communication with Russia because problems could not be solved without communication.

Asked about a CIA interrogation programme used on terrorism suspects after 9/11, she said a recently released report would have "no negative repercussions" on Croatia. The report says the CIA deceived the public and the US government about the effectiveness of the programme, enforced in 2002-06, under which al-Qaeda members and other captives were interrogated around the world. According to the report, the methods used for the interrogations were far crueller than the CIA said.

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