The EU urged Serbia and Croatia on Friday to help defuse growing tensions in neighboring Bosnia, which are undermining stability there, 15 years after a civil war that killed nearly 100,000 people.

“Our joint interest is to have a stable Bosnia,” EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said after meeting with Croatia’s new president, Ivo Josipovic.

At the same time, Serbian Prime Minister Cvetkovic held talks in Brussels with EU President Herman van Rompuy, who said regional cooperation was vital in safeguarding stability in the Western Balkans.

Top EU and NATO officials have expressed concern at rising tensions in Bosnia following the collapse in October of a Western-backed effort to revise the country’s constitution.

Both Croatia and Serbia exert strong influence on their ethnic kin in Bosnia, who are united in a lose confederation with the Bosniak majority. Ethnic Serbs have threatened to hold a referendum on independence, if they are forced into a closer union, which Bosnia’s other two communities support.

The EU and the United States have been seeking to streamline Bosnia’s complex political system, which was put in place by the agreement hammered out in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995.

The accord divided Bosnia into two entities, the Serb Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat federation. But in practice the system has proven too decentralized and unwieldily, and has blocked the country from moving closer to European Union membership.

The constitution also created an enormous and expensive administration with three presidents, three parliaments and several hundred ministers on various levels in a country of 3.5 million people.

The EU still maintains a garrison of about 2,000 soldiers in Bosnia, the remnant of a U.S.-led force of 60,000 soldiers deployed to keep the peace in 1995.

Tensions between the ethnic groups also have been exacerbated by two other developments:

 The arrest this week in London of former Bosnian Vice President Ejup Ganic after Serbia issued an arrest warrant accusing him of war crimes in connection with the 1992 deaths of Serbian troops in Bosnia. He is viewed as a hero by many Muslim Bosniaks.

 A statement by Radovan Karadzic, wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, at the international war crimes tribunal that he was protecting Serbs against a fundamentalist Muslim plot.

In a related development, the prime ministers of Croatia and Slovenia and Serbian President Boris Tadic met in the Slovenian town of Ptuj Friday to discuss closer integration between the nations of the western Balkans.

Relations have been strained recently over the recognition by Slovenia and Croatia of Kosovo, a Serbian province that has been an international protectorate since a brief war in 1999. Serbia insists that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008 is illegal.

SLOBODAN LEKIC

March 05, 2010

Associated Press correspondents Snjezana Vukic in Zagreb, Aida Cerkez in Sarajevo and Jovana Gec in Belgrade contributed to this report.

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