COUNTRIES FROM THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA SHOULD COOPERATE SAYS EU

BRUXELLES, Oct 21 (Hina) - The Director of the Southeast Europe Section with the Administration for Foreign Affairs of the European Commission Gerhard Sabathil on Thursday in Brussels said that the process of accessing the European Union for countries established in the region of the former Yugoslavia is as important as cooperation between them. "This has nothing to do with the establishment of old structures", Sabathil said speaking to a group of Croatian journalists. He was commenting on a recent thought by the president of the Economic Committee Roman Prodij about the establishment of an organisation which would facilitate cooperation between countries of the former Yugoslavia. Speaking about the setting up of a consultative working group for Croatia's access to the EU, Sabathil said that for now this was the only forum for formal cooperation between Croatia and the EU seeing that these countries did not have relations based on agreements with that organisation. Sabathil repeated the establishment of a working group was dependent on Croatia fulfilling certain conditions - adoption of an election law, which according to Sabathil was a priority; for the media to give fair coverage of the pre-election campaign; to conduct free and fair elections. He added that the EU doesn't consider Croatia as "last" but rather requires Croatia to fulfil the same conditions set for all countries in the region. He expressed his regret that Croatia was in the group of three countries which do not have agreement relations with the EU, along with Yugoslavia and Belorussia. (hina) sp mm