Handing over Milosevic 'not a priority,' Kostunica tells EU leaders

By Robin Oakley, CNN.com European political editor

BIARRITZ, France -- Vojislav Kostunica, a man whom no European Union leaders knew and whose name few of them could have spelled only six months ago, was the star of the final day of their summit in Biarritz.

He told them that his country always had been a part of Europe historically, economically and politically. “Now here we are again,” he said.

The feting of the newly elected Yugoslavian President on Saturday rescued the summit leaders from wrangling over EU constitutional reforms and from powerless hand-wringing over their patent inability to affect the situation in the Middle East.

But Kostunica used his first appearence outside Serbia to make clear once again that he was in no hurry to hand over the ousted Slobodan Milosevic to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

Although he accepted that there was an obligation to co-operate, Kostunica said that it was “not the first priority” after the emergence of his country from “a long,dark period.”

The EU leaders, anxious not to fall out with a new member of the European democratic ‘family’ were happy to concur.

Kostunica also confirmed that he was ready to drop the name of Yugoslavia and have the state he led renamed “Serbia and Montenegro.”

He said he would be happy for the people of Serbia and Montenegro to have separate referendums to determine whether it was their will to stay together under that umbrella.

If ‘Serbia and Montenegro’ seemed a long name for a country, grinned the otherwise serious Kostunica, then it was no worse than the United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), he said.

Kostunica said that his greeting by the 15 EU leaders was an emotional moment because it symbolised the normalization of his country.

Under questioning from reporters, he would not put a figure on the amount of aid required to repair the damage inflicted on his country by 78 days of Nato bombing in 1999 or how long it would take to complete the work.

The question he had found it hardest to answer over lunch with the EU leaders, he said, was to set out in concrete terms exactly what was needed to re-equip his country. The country had not only suffered badly from eight years of sanctions, he said, but from neglect under the previous regime.

Asked about his kind of nationalism, Kostunica said that he accepted the Dayton Accords and did not have ambitions to recreate a Greater Serbia.

But he did not step back under challenge from his earlier comment that any Serb who forgot Nato’s ‘crimes’ against his country would lose part of his own identity.

He did, however, update his earlier acceptance that Milosevic might have a continuing role in Yugoslavian politics.

With Milosevic supporters melting away day by day, he said: “Mr Milosevic has no political future in Yugoslavia.”

His measured and pragmatic approach appeared to have made a big impression on the summit leaders.

President Jacques Chirac of France, the summit host, said that Kostunica represented democracy rediscovered and regained thanks to victory first in the ballot box and then peacefully by the Yugoslav people in the streets.

The EU, he said, would do everything in its power to help Yugoslavia back on the road to Europe and the road home.

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