Brussels, 10/05/2006 (Agence Europe) - In a declaration adopted in Rome on 9 May, the International Commission on the Balkans, chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato and made up of leaders from the region and the European Union, expressed its concern that “European leaders have lost their courage to implement the commitment they made in 2003 to bring the region into the EU … and have retreated into policies that, instead of transforming the Balkans, propose merely to manage the status quo”. What was need today was “a return to the spirit of the 2003 Thessaloniki commitment” (when the European Council of June 2003 opened a European perspective for the Balkans), said the signatories, believing that “the real referendum on the EU's future will take place in the Balkans”. The declaration regretted that the message from the informal EU Foreign Ministers meeting in Salzburg in early March was that “the EU is neither ready nor willing to offer credible membership perspectives”, while the current Status quo “in the Western Balkans is dangerous and unsustainable and that European integration is the only way to bring development and prosperity to the region” (see EUROPE 9150 on “Gymnich-type” meeting in Salzburg). Without a “bold accession strategy which integrates all Balkan countries into the Union within the next decade” went on the signatories, the EU would “remain mired as a reluctant colonial power at enormous cost in places like Kosovo, Bosnia and even Macedonia”. On “absorption capacity”, the declaration said, “The truth is that the population of the small Balkan countries is about 4% of the EU population today. The challenge is not to the 'absorption capacity' but to the moral capacity of the Union”.