Croatia's parliament voted on Thursday to allow European Union fishermen to operate in an Adriatic no-fishing zone, a concession that should rejuvenate the former Yugoslav republic's EU membership talks, according to Reuters. A tiny majority of deputies supported the ruling Croatian Democratic Union's proposal to scrap enforcement of the zone on EU countries after the European Commission made clear accession talks would stall unless the issue was resolved. "The fisheries zone is important, a national interest, but EU accession is an absolute national priority," Prime Minister Ivo Sanader told deputies during the parliamentary debate. Some nationalist leaders and Croatian fishermen described the vote as a capitulation in the face of an EU ultimatum, but Sanader said the country had no choice if it wanted to achieve its goal of joining the EU in 2010 or 2011. Most of the opposition abstained from the vote, state radio reported. Sanader's main coalition partner, the conservative Peasant Party which strongly supports the zone, voted against but said this would not affect its presence in government. At the start of the year Croatia added EU members to the list of those it had barred from fishing in the zone, which reaches into the middle of the Adriatic and is designed to preserve fish stocks and limit pollution.
