(Adnkronos) – The European Union must be a leading presence in the Western Balkans and cannot allow the region to become another of Europe’s “crisis flashpoints”, Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani said on Thursday.
”’We can’t afford another crisis flashpoint to flare up on our continent,” Tajani told a joint session of the upper and lower house of parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committees.
“To prevent this, the EU must be present and be a leading player in the Western Balkans,” Tajani said.
Italy is “at the front line” in guaranteeing security the Western Balkans, commanding the Nato-lead KFOR mission and EU’s Eulex mission in Kosovo and participating in the EU’s Altea (EUFOR) peacekeeping force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Tajani underlined.
Tajani’s remarks came amid rising tensions in Bosnia’s Serb Republic after a state court sentenced its president and pro-Russian nationalist Milorad Dodik to a year in jail last month and banned him from politics for six years for defying the orders of an international peace envoy, Christian Schmidt.
Under a US-backed deal in 1995, known as the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended Bosnia’s bloody 1992-1995 ethnic conflict, Schmidt has the power to interpret the peace deal.
The political tensions in Bosnia underscores divisions in the region between those seeking integration with the West and those sympathetic to Russia.
