The European Union agreed on Wednesday to create a mission to report on whether Croatia was cooperating with the Hague war crimes tribunal sufficiently to merit the opening of EU membership talks. EU leaders in Brussels also backed the decision taken by foreign ministers last week to postpone accession negotiations with Zagreb as punishment for its failure to bring in a top war crimes indictee who many Croatians see as a folk hero. "It (the mission) will ... consult (U.N. war crimes prosecutor) Carla del Ponte and the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) and meet the Croatians," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said. The mission will probably meet Croatian officials in Luxembourg, he said. An EU diplomat said it was not certain that the team would travel to Croatia to do its work. A senior Zagreb-based Western diplomat said the new mission did not mean Croatia would have it easy. "The rules of the game have not been changed. The EU needs consensus to start negotiations and that cannot be solved only by having more talks on cooperation with the tribunal. The facts have to speak for themselves," he said. --More 2303 Local Time 2003 GMT
