Addressing the conference, former Croatian foreign minister Miomir Zuzul said the crucial questions arising now were why the European Union was so important for the process of stabilisation and reconciliation in the region and why the process of EU enlargement had to continue.
"If there is no reconciliation, there is no stability, and if there is no stability, there is no progress," Zuzul said.
The former minister explained that the notion of ethnic reconciliation was at the heart of the Western civilisation and the European Union, which he said was stated in the Schumann declaration that served as the basis for the establishment of the EU.
Zuzul dismissed the possibility of western Balkan countries joining the EU together, describing such proposals as unjust and unproductive. He also spoke critically of opinions on the role of the Hague tribunal in the reconciliation process.
"I don't believe that the ICTY can carry out the process of reconciliation. The answer to reconciliation lies in the future," he said, explaining that courts, including the Hague tribunal, were dealing with the past, while reconciliation and stability in the region required the continuation of EU enlargement and the establishment of security.
Negotiations about the collective admission of western Balkan countries to the EU would be a "completely wrong" approach considering the differences between those countries and the fact that they would hold one another back in the process of integration, Zuzul said.
The Croatian government is doing its utmost to solve the remaining outstanding issue in cooperation with the Hague tribunal. That is why negotiations with Croatia should start immediately to make the best of "the right momentum", Zuzul said, adding that the EU could discontinue the talks if it established that Croatia was not meeting its obligations.
A professor of international law at Zagreb's Law School, Ivo Josipovic, spoke about the attitude of the Croatian authorities and judiciary towards the prosecution of war crimes and principles of the rule of law in the judiciary. Speaking about the number of war criminals that were prosecuted and convicted in Croatia since the start of the 1990s, Josipovic said that the judiciary had proven to have competent personnel that was capable of conducting unbiased trials and that there was no more discrimination on ethnic grounds as in the early 1990s, when most convicts were Serbs.
The head of the Croatian Helsinki Committee, Zarko Puhovski, spoke about the attitude to minorities, stressing that the incumbent government had a positive attitude to that issue. However, he added that the fact that the number of Serbs in Croatia had been reduced 3.5 times in five years "in my opinion bears witness to ethnic cleansing, as I can't see any other way to explain it".
With regard to inter-ethnic cooperation in Croatia, Puhovski noted that the attitude of the current government was very positive in that regard, which he said was evidenced by the support of the Independent Democratic Serb Party (SDSS) to the government of Ivo Sanader.
A minor incident happened at the conference after an address by Slovene journalist and analyst Tomaz Savnik, who said that the case of the runaway Croatian general Ante Gotovina for the EU was only a paradigm of non-existence of the rule of law and credibility on Croatia's part, which he said was evidenced both by the government's conduct and in everyday life, with even young generations being divided into partisans and the Ustasha.
Croatia's Ambassador to Slovenia Mario Nobilo protested against this, threatening to leave the conference if Savnik continued with defamation.