Balkan leaders and international experts at the meeting in the Macedonian town of Ohrid -- the site of a 2001 peace accord ending an ethnic Albanian insurgency in the former Yugoslav republic -- agreed on ways to reinforce border controls described as "inadequate" by NATO.

"Countries in the region have to modernise their ways of communication because members of organised crime have very modern equipment," said NATO's ambassador to Macedonia, Robert Serry.

The Ohrid conference was attended by the leaders of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro and Romania -- all members of the 1999 Balkans Stability Pact.

The new measures, to be applied by the end of 2004, will introduce a new system of information exchange between national authorities and boost cooperation in the training of border police, Vladimir Drobnjak of the Balkans Stability Pact told reporters.

They were "tailored to the needs and requirements of each participant country in order to put border management in the region in the line of EU standards as soon as possible", he said, and would also help to integrate Balkan countries into NATO.

Reinhard Priebe, the European Comission's director for the western Balkans, said the main objective was to "open borders of the region as much as possible for legal trade and close them very firmly for illegal activities".

The conference was attended by NATO Secretary General George Robertson, as well as the head of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Jan Kubis and EU officials.

Estonia, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia have already been formally cleared to join NATO while Albania, Croatia and Macedonia are still waiting for their invitations.

WAR.WIRE