By Publio Manuel Isaldi
Everyone knew this year´s 20th anniversary of the first genocide committed on European soil since World War II was going to be special. There was of course the symbolic twenty-year mark, which prompted a flurry of articles from left and right on everything from the infamous UN Dutch peacekeepers who stood aside while the Bosnian Serbs separated women from men to the labours of International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia
Taking time out of the Greek crisis, Chancellor Merkel set off on a tour of the Western Balkans (8-9 July), reassuring the nations of Albania, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina of her support for their eventual joining the European Union. The three Balkan countries have long been campaigning to be part of the 28-nation bloc and see their candidature jeopardized by the EU’s preoccupation with what is happening with Greece.
The EU has decided to implement the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) negotiated in 2005 and signed in 2009 with Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The decision was taken at the meeting of the EU foreign ministers on 16 March 2015, following an earlier joint initiative by the foreign ministers of Germany and the UK. The SAA is intended to unblock BiH’s path towards EU membership, sidelining the earlier condition of implementation by BiH of the European Court of Human Right’s “Sejdic-Finci” ruling.
