Bosnia-Herzegovina is moving decisively towards membership in the European Union and NATO and towards the life of a normal, peaceful European country, Ashdown said in a report to the United Nations Security Council.
Ashdown, however, warned that complete failure by Republika Srpska to honour its commitments towards the Hague war crimes tribunal might ruin the country's chances of entering NATO's Partnership for Peace programme at a summit in Istanbul.
The international envoy condemned Republika Srpska for its failure to hand over a single war crimes indictee to the Hague tribunal over the past nine years.
He welcomed the admission by the Bosnian Serb government of the scale of the massacre of Bosnian Muslims by Serb forces in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, and stressed that their failure to hand over war crimes suspects was an insult to justice and to the values of institutions which Bosnian Serb leaders claim they want to join.
Addressing the UN Security Council, Bosnian Foreign Minister Mladen Ivanic said that the country was being transformed into a normal European state by introducing a market economy and switching from a pre-war communist regime to a Western democracy and from a country at war to a factor of regional stability.
Ivanic pledged that Bosnia-Herzegovina would make all the necessary efforts to achieve these goals and called on the international community to continue providing support for the process of transformation.