Bosnia Aims to Apply for EU By End of Year

`Bosnia wants to become a candidate for the European Union by the end of the year,` said Sven Alkalaj.

Bosnia hopes to become a candidate for European Union membership in November or December despite outside concern the Balkan country is not politically or economically ready, the foreign minister said on Thursday.

Sven Alkalaj spoke ahead of an informal European Union foreign ministers’ meeting in the Czech Republic on Friday and Saturday in which he said he would press the case for Bosnian EU candidacy and visa-free travel to Europe.

“We are working together with the (European) Commission. We don’t want to do it on our own or without consent of the Commission,” said Alkalaj. “We don’t want to be that we apply and our candidacy is rejected, that’s the worst option, or that it waits in the draw for several years.”

“(Bosnia wants) to become a candidate for the European Union by the end of the year,” he told Reuters in an interview. “Late in the year. I don’t expect before November, December this year.”

Bosnia, split into two autonomous regions under a weak central government by the Dayton peace treaty that ended the 1992-95 war, has turned to the International Monetary Fund for help to prevent a rise of poverty and social unrest.

All of the countries of the Balkans hope eventually to join the EU. Of the former Yugoslav republics, Slovenia is already a member, Croatia is next in line, and Macedonia and Montenegro have already applied.

Bosnia, Serbia and Albania have said they intend to apply in 2009, although some diplomats and observers say continued political instability more than 13 years after its war would make a Bosnian application premature.

“They are completely unfocused on their part of the responsibility in this process, on what they should do,” Miroslav Lajcak, the peace envoy who served his last day on Wednesday, said in a January interview. “They should not apply. They are not ready because they are not performing properly.”

Alkalaj acknowledged that the EU may be less ready to take on new members than in the past.

“We know the European Union itself has its own problems: first of all Lisbon Treaty, second of all financial crisis, making them more inverted, not out reaching,” Alkalaj said. “But it is very important that we are not left behind.”