Serbia hails its clear path toward joining the E.U

Serbia hails its clear path toward joining the E.U.

IHT, STEPHEN CASTLE, March 3, 2012 Saturday

ABSTRACT

The Serbian president, Boris Tadic, said his country's acceptance as a candidate for the E.U. was a "great achievement" for a nation once ostracized for its role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

FULL TEXT

A day after Serbia formally become a candidate for membership in the European Union, its leader called the development a ''great achievement'' Friday for a nation once ostracized for its role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

''This is a great day for Serbia,'' President Boris Tadic said in a televised news conference in Belgrade.

At a meeting in Brussels, E.U. leaders agreed on Thursday that the government in Belgrade had made enough progress to be placed on a clear path toward joining the bloc.

What it takes to clear path toward joining the EU

In recent years, Serbia has stepped up cooperation on tracking down war crimes suspects, and last month it signed an agreement to improve contacts with Kosovo, a southern Serbian province that has declared independence. Last October, the European Commission made improved relations with Kosovo a condition of Serbia's being granted official candidacy.

''We agreed tonight to grant Serbia the status of E.U. candidate country,'' Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, said Thursday. ''This is a remarkable achievement, a result of the efforts demonstrated by both sides in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina.''

Serbia was considered responsible for much of the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s, and NATO bombed it in 1999 in an effort to prevent a more severe crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The legacy of that period set back Serbia's efforts to join the European Union as it struggled to come to terms with the past while modernizing its economy and political system.

Concerns – I think timely and legitimate – neighboring states raised

Analysts say that the symbolism of Serbia's being welcomed by Europe after 20 years of isolation is not seen so clearly by its neighbors, which are far more focused on daily concerns. Despite the progress of the Western Balkans toward European integration, economic standards here are the lowest in Europe.

Sonja Biserko, who heads the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, said Friday that the leaders of the European Union had made a strategic decision: to integrate Serbia within the E.U. system rather than allow it to use its potential to destabilize the region, specifically in Kosovo and Bosnia.

''Serbia has finally decided on its strategic orientation after three decades of not being sure where it belongs,'' Ms. Biserko said.

For years, the Serbian bid for membership was thwarted because of the hunt for Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military commander. That obstacle disappeared when Mr. Mladic was arrested last year and handed to a U.N. tribunal in The Hague, where he has been indicted on genocide charges. Prosecutors have argued that forces under his military command massacred more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.

What made EU embrace Serbia

The European Union has struggled in recent years to accommodate 12 new nations, which it accepted in 2004 and 2007. Most are former Communist countries. But despite flagging public enthusiasm for the prospect of further enlargement,  European policy makers have kept the door open to Balkan countries in the hope that the lure of E.U. membership can help stabilize a volatile region.

Slovenia joined the bloc in 2004, and next year Croatia is to become the second E.U. member that once was part of Yugoslavia.

Even with candidate status, it is likely that Serbia will have to wait about a year for a starting date for negotiations with the European Commission to bring its laws in line with E.U. laws, a process that can take several years. Talks with Croatia began in 2005 and concluded late last year.

No country that has begun negotiations has ever been denied E.U. membership, although Turkey's accession process has stalled over its refusal to recognize Cyprus, an E.U. member.  (DO – and Muslim … )

Issue ahead of road toward joining EU

Serbia will have to navigate a series of difficult issues as part of its application. The government in Belgrade does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state and was not asked to do so as a condition of gaining candidate status by the bloc, which is itself divided on the issue.

Europe's leaders, however, did insist on improved relations between Serbia and Kosovo before taking the latest step. Last month, the two sides agreed on conditions under which Kosovo could be represented at international meetings and on technical parameters for border controls. Serbia agreed for the first time to cooperate in forums in which Kosovo is represented by Kosovars, but the name Kosovo will be marked by an asterisk indicating its disputed status.

Diplomats hope the deal on border issues will reduce recent tension in northern Kosovo, where many Serbs reject the government in Pristina.

In Pristina, the public is more interested in discussing the border agreement than Serbia's invitation to start talks with the European Union, analysts said.

''The debate has focused more on the asterisk than if Serbia will join the E.U.,'' said Agron Demi, a policy analyst from the Institute for Advanced Studies GAP in Pristina.

''Kosovo has won a little bit with this agreement but Serbia has won a lot,'' Mr. Demi said. ''Kosovars were hoping that someone would block Serbia's candidacy because people don't feel Serbia has fulfilled the requirements of the E.U.''

Reaction by Croatia to Serbia being welcomed by EU

Zarko Puhovski, a professor of political science at Zagreb University, said the news about Serbia was talked about in Croatia, but it was not dominating the headlines. Despite unresolved anger over Serbia's role the war in Croatia in the early 1990s, Croats are too cynical about the process to pay attention to the symbolism of the E.U. ''welcoming'' Serbia to Europe, he said.

''Croats are so disappointed with the moral content of the European Union that no one views a country entering it as a point of distinction,'' Mr. Puhovski said from Zagreb.


==========
=========================================================


a key deal b/w Serbia and Kosovo on border control and Kosovo's representation at international meeting 

Kosovo and Serbia reach key deal

Pact on border controls should help Belgrade with its E.U. aspirations

MATTHEW BRUNWASSER, IHT, February 25, 2012 Saturday

ABSTRACT

The agreement outlines the conditions under which Kosovo can be represented at international meetings and will help Serbia move toward E.U. candidate status.

FULL TEXT

Serbia and Kosovo, its former province, reached an agreement Friday that helps pave the way for Serbia's gaining official ''candidate'' status to join the European Union.

The agreement outlines the conditions under which Kosovo can be represented at international meetings and outlines technical parameters for border controls.

European Commission leaders will meet in the coming week to decide on whether Serbia has met all the criteria to begin accession talks; a key sticking point had been the tense relations with Kosovo, which declared independence in 2008. A previous E.U. meeting, in December, declined to offer Serbia an invitation, as German peacekeeping troops had come under attack by Serbs in North Kosovo.

Serbia has until now thwarted any participation by representatives of the Kosovo government in international meetings by walking out or refusing to participate. Under the new agreement, Serbia will accept international forums in which Kosovo is represented by Kosovars for the first time.

The diplomatically complex agreement states that the word ''Republic'' will not appear next to the name Kosovo in international forums. Instead, a footnote will refer to Security Council Resolution 1244 - which did not mention the independence of Kosovo - and a ruling by the International Court of Justice saying that Kosovo's declaration of independence in 2008 was legal.

There are hopes that the agreement on technical border issues will reduce violence like the incidents seen in recent months by ethnic Serbs living in North Kosovo who refuse to live under rule from Pristina, the capital of Kosovo.

Diplomats said the agreements cleared the path to a positive decision when E.U. heads of government will decide to begin the process of making Serbia a member of the bloc - a process that could take years.

''These agreements are a major step forward,'' Catherine Ashton, the E.U. foreign policy chief, and Stefan Fule, the European commissioner for enlargement, said in a joint statement Friday. ''They are important not just for Serbia and Kosovo but for the stability of the region and thus for the E.U.''

In Belgrade, the agreement was seen by Serbs as an inevitable compromise Serbia had to make to join the Union, said Bratislav Grubacic, the editor of the VIP news agency in Belgrade and a political commentator.

The main difficulty faced by the Serbian negotiators, he said, was ''how not to provoke any angry reactions in Serbia.''

The former Serbian province remains a hot button issue in Serbian politics. The Serbian minority and Orthodox churches in the predominantly Muslim country continue to occupy a powerful place in the Serbian psyche and stoke genuine passions.

Serbia will hold parliamentary elections in May and E.U. candidacy is seen as key for the ruling center-left coalition to remain in power.

But it is becoming less clear how important E.U. candidacy will be for Serbian voters, Mr. Grubacic said.

In Kosovo, the public is irritated at the government's agreement to not use the word ''Republic'' in regional forums, according to Engjellushe Morina, a political analyst in Pristina.

''The public feeling is that we are being used as a tool for Serbia to get E.U. candidate status,'' she said. ''What is Kosovo getting out of all of this?''

The European Commission will study the feasibility of reaching a Stabilization and Association Agreement with Kosovo, which would be the first step toward membership in the European Union. Kosovo currently has none.

''This is a de facto recognition of the independence of Kosovo,'' said Edita Tahiri, Kosovo's lead negotiator.

She says 88 countries, including the United States and all E.U. member states except for five, now recognize the independent Republic of Kosovo.

Until now, Kosovo has been represented in international forums by Unmik - the United Nations Mission in Kosovo.

Serbia was expected to be granted candidate status after it captured Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, last year. But Germany blocked move that in December, saying it wanted to see progress in talks between Serbia and Kosovo.

But on Friday, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, called the agreement ''a big step in the right direction.'' Mr. Westerwelle, speaking in Brussels, added that the agreement's endorsement by both sides would be important to Serbia's prospects.

Asked about the agreement to not use the word ''Republic,'' Ms. Tahiri said, ''We are focusing on the substance, rather than the formalities.''

The opposition Vetevendosje party in Kosovo released a statement accusing the government of removing the ''Republic'' from Kosovo in exchange for a footnote.

''We are a Republic for ourselves only. And this is exactly contrary to the concept of a Republic,'' the statement said.

The party said it would organize a protest on Monday to ''suspend for four hours the work of this government, which is suspending our state and independence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/world/europe/22iht-mladic.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

October 21, 2010

Serbia Tested as War Crimes Suspect Roams Free

.

By DAN BILEFSKY and DOREEN CARVAJAL

.

BELGRADE — After 15 years on the run — sometimes in plain sight at soccer matches and weddings and sometimes deep in the fabric of this secretive city — Europe’s most wanted war-crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic, is being hidden by no more than a handful of loyalists, most probably in a neighborhood of Communist-era housing towers, according to investigators and some of his past associates.

The diminished circumstances of the former Bosnian Serb general, who once was protected by scores of allies and Serbian government officials, make him ripe for capture, according to these people. But a softening by several European countries on whether his arrest should be a prerequisite for Serbia’s admission to the European Union is raising questions about whether he will ever face justice.

These developments make this a seminal moment not only in the search for Mr. Mladic but also in Europe’s often agonized deliberations over how much to encourage the manhunt in the face of deeply conflicting priorities. In the name of unity and stability, should Europe put a premium on rehabilitating a battered country that became a pariah state in the Balkan wars of the 1990’s?

Or in the name of its human rights tradition, should Europe first require a friendly Serbian government to make the politically difficult arrest of a man blamed for the worst ethnically motivated mass murder on the Continent since World War II? That involved the massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys from the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, an enclave under the failed protection of United Nations peacekeepers from the Netherlands.

An investigation into Mr. Mladic’s whereabouts, how he has eluded capture, and Europe’s shifting response to him paints a picture of a man of obstinate will and bravado, slowly and haltingly being drawn into a shrinking world of shadows. Over the years, as European pressure for an arrest intensified and then retreated, he received vital, little known, assistance from Serbian military forces and several of the country’s past governments.

By all accounts, one of the most effective points of pressure was withholding consideration of E.U. membership until Serbia produced Mr. Mladic.

But as Europe has struggled with the dilemma, time seems to have played its hand. The vividness of the wartime horrors has receded outside the Balkans. Mr. Mladic has gotten older, and, according to many people, sicker and more isolated, probably moving from nondescript apartment to nondescript apartment in New Belgrade, a sprawling extension of Belgrade across the Sava River.

The two-year-old government of Boris Tadic has been overtly pro-Western and has vowed to apprehend Mr. Mladic, even though he has defied arrest for more than two years after his fellow fugitive, the former Bosnian strongman Radovan Karadzic, was brought in.

Given all of this, there are strong indications that when European foreign ministers meet in Luxembourg next Monday, the balance could tip away from requiring an immediate arrest and that an E.U. admission process that would take several years could start.

“Your future is the European Union and that future must accrue as soon as possible,” the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, said in Belgrade this month, a comment representative of others made in Belgrade over the past month, by officials from France, Germany, Belgium and other E.U. members. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton also visited and offered encouragement to the government.

But some senior European officials and human rights groups are unrelenting in believing that a compromise over Mr. Mladic would undermine international law and amount to a moral failure.

“The arrest should be a number one priority,” Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, said in an interview.

At a commemoration of the massacre this summer, he was one of many speakers to urge a quick capture. “I said in Srebrenica at the summer memorial that this was the most emotional moment for me in my three years with the tribunal,” Mr. Brammertz recalled. “I could see that for all of the survivors and relatives, Srebrenica is not an event from the past, but something dominating their life, not only today but for tomorrow. And the number one priority for the victims is to see Mladic in the Hague.”

Although the European Union halted accession talks in 2006 when Serbia failed to arrest Mr. Mladic, Dutch diplomats say they are now the lone holdouts for an arrest as a prerequisite for resuming the discussions. They are hoping to forestall action until December, when Mr. Brammertz issues his annual report evaluating Serbia’s effort in the manhunt. In the last few days, to the consternation of some E.U. officials, he has called for more aggressiveness.

Mariko Peters, a Green member in the Dutch Parliament, which passed a resolution this month seeking to delay a decision, acknowledged, “Our Dutch position has become more isolated.”

“Many nations are weighing Mladic’s capture as just one of many factors — stabilization of the Balkans, the Kosovo issue, upcoming Serbian elections and the need to give rewards to democratic forces that are weak,” she said.

Mr. Tadic, the Serbian president, has been adamant that he is dedicated to a capture. In response to written questions, he wrote, “This government of Serbia is doing absolutely everything in its power to locate and arrest him.”

Given history, many analysts in Serbia and beyond remain skeptical.

“It’s easy to hide successfully when nobody wants to find you,” said a key protector of Mr. Mladic’s fellow fugitive, Mr. Karadzic, offering a wry smile.

Out in the open

Mr. Mladic, who commanded Bosnian Serb forces, has proved a wily foe — tough, resourceful and abetted by military-trained protectors, according to more than two dozen sources, including government investigators, two loyalists who aided him and Mr. Karadzic, and five family friends, including the family priest.

A tall, burly man of 68 with a ruddy face and sharp blue eyes, Mr. Mladic was born in a remote Bosnian Serb village, Bozanovici. He was shaped by poverty and the killing of his partisan father by soldiers of the Nazi puppet state in Croatia. His rise in the Yugoslav Army was swift.

In 1992, one month after a Bosnian majority voted to secede from Yugoslavia, Mr. Mladic’s forces launched the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, killing 10,000 people, including 3,500 children. In July 1995, the Srebrenica men and boys were led to killing fields where they were shot with hands bound. The Bosnian war ended five months later.

That year, an international court in The Hague indicted Mr. Mladic twice, for war crimes in the Sarajevo siege and for genocide in the Srebrenica massacre. He became a fugitive at a time when 60,000 NATO troops were on the ground, raising questions about why he was not seized. American and European diplomats say a consensus prevailed that no country wanted to spill its soldiers’ blood in a battle with Mr. Mladic’s armed protectors — which has left Serbian governments asking why they should risk the same.

Mr. Mladic certainly did not lie low for many years. Protected by Serbia’s nationalist president, Slobodan Milosevic, he visited for several years the grave of his daughter, Ana, who committed suicide with his favorite pistol in 1994. He enjoyed a Chinese-Yugoslav soccer match surrounded by bodyguards at a Belgrade stadium in 2000. His framed photograph hung in bars like the Crazy House in New Belgrade. He prayed at his brother’s funeral in 2001 in a jogging suit and sunglasses with a young woman on his arm, according to the family priest, Vojislav Carkic, who said local men blocked off the cemetery road.

One protector — a Serbian military officer who was later arrested — recalled that Mr. Mladic lived fairly openly in a house guarded by a private 52-man security detail with four cars. Last year, a former Mladic bodyguard, Branislav Puhalo, testified that the unit was established in 1997 on Mr. Milosevic’s orders.

For Mr. Mladic, this was the easiest time.

Doubts grow about manhunt

After 13 calamitous years, Mr. Milosevic was ousted in October 2000 after a popular uprising.

In 2001, a new government, threatened with the loss of American aid and World Bank loans, arrested him on genocide charges and sent him to The Hague.

Mr. Mladic pulled back from public view and began to move among military barracks, according to friends, who said they would visit him to play table tennis or chess. As he did, the myth of his fugitive cunning only grew. In 2002, the government signed a cooperation agreement with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. It eventually asked him to leave the Topcider barracks in Dedinje, an exclusive Belgrade district where he was hiding. According to Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, he simply refused.

The Topcider barracks, built in the 1960s under the dictator Josip Broz Tito, was an ideal hiding place, as it concealed an underground city carved into a hill. Mr. Milosevic is believed to have hidden behind its thick, reinforced concrete walls during the NATO bombing of 1999.

The military authorities tried to smoke Mr. Mladic out by summoning a police helicopter to hover over the barracks, dropping a decoy rope ladder to pretend a raid was imminent. But that did little more than provoke Mr. Mladic to speed away, a level further into Belgrade.

Investigators say that they chose not to attempt an arrest out of fear of a violent shoot-out with Mr. Mladic’s ardent military supporters. This, along with other subsequent failures to make an arrest, intensified doubts about whether the manhunt was genuine.

At one point, a former protector said, 50 bodyguards formed a human shield when investigators showed up at one of the safe houses Mr. Mladic began to use, and he fashioned another escape.

There were other near showdowns. In March 2003, the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, pledged to arrest him to pave the way for E.U. admission. Days later, a sniper killed Mr. Djindjic.

‘Snitch culture’ aids movement

When their network was vibrant, Mladic loyalists would meet routinely in four crowded public lobbies in Belgrade — summoned by the code, “waiting room,” according to a former protector who is now on trial in Belgrade with more than a dozen others for helping Mr. Mladic. All were brought in at a time of intense Western pressure.

As the former protector described the process as it worked in 2006, they discarded mobile telephones and SIM cards 4 kilometers, or 2.5 miles, from their gatherings in crowded places where they could easily blend in. Meeting face to face, they hardly spoke, discussing protection logistics by exchanging written messages that they burned.

Mr. Mladic’s pursuers came from two agencies, one military and another that reported to senior government officials, and sometimes they clashed. According to an agent involved, military intelligence labeled one of its actions “Operation Network.” Mr. Mladic was referred to as “The Host.”

A former member of the government’s surveillance operation — who described with precision the monitoring of Mr. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic — said investigators knew the fugitives’ hiding places until February 2008, five months before the Tadic government took over and Mr. Karadzic was apprehended. Until then, the official said, the surveillance team did not receive an order to make an arrest.

The former investigator said teams stalked both men outside their apartments and followed their helpers on grocery trips. Until his arrest on genocide charges in 2007, they said, the mastermind of the network that shielded Mr. Mladic was Zdravko Tolimir, a former general and an assistant commander of intelligence in the Bosnian Serb Army who is now on trial in The Hague.

The investigators received technical help from the United States and other countries, but those forces have dwindled. And even when at full strength, according to Mr. Mladic’s protectors and investigators, they faced an insidious force that often undid their efforts — an elaborate “snitch culture” in which officials in military and state intelligence regularly tipped off Mladic operatives.

Perhaps with such insight, Mr. Mladic visited his dying mother’s bedside in 2003, Father Carkic, the family priest, related, and then vanished before investigators arrived. His mother’s marble tomb, located in a verdant Bosnian cemetery, is inscribed: Provided by Ratko Mladic.

Pressure and concessions

Mr. Mladic’s support from Serbian governments ebbed and flowed, shaped by national politics and the West’s inconsistent pressure.

But on many occasions, his protection reached to the political elite, investigators say. Mr. Vukcevic, the prosecutor, said that Vojislav Kostunica, prime minister from 2004 to 2008, pressured him to try those accused of war crimes in Serbia, to shield them from the potentially harsher justice of The Hague.

When he refused, he said, Mr. Kostunica tried to oust him, but was blocked by the West, particularly the United States. Mr. Kostunica has vigorously denied in the Serbian media that he knew the whereabouts of Mr. Mladic or Mr. Karadzic or obstructed the search.

Still, Western officials detected a long-running pattern: Whenever pressure increased, the Serbs made limited concessions. When pressure receded, efforts evaporated. The authorities staged raids targeting Mr. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic through the first half of 2008, for example. But in interviews, Serbian investigators and protectors of the two men said members of Serbian state intelligence services were simultaneously watching Mr. Mladic and Mr. Karadzic in their true hiding place, far from the drama.

“This game has been going on now for five to six years,” a Western diplomat said. “They are either waiting for him to die — a stroke or kidney problems — or hoping to get into the European Union without doing anything.”

‘Very disciplined’ fugitive

The government’s boldest move took place in 2006. In raids on homes and hangouts, the government arrested more than a dozen protectors, culminating in the arrest a year later of the network’s supposed organizer, Mr. Tolimir, the former Bosnian Serb general. The actions severely damaged the network, but there is a belief that they, too, actually worked to help Mr. Mladic.

To Mr. Vukcevic, the Serbian prosecutor, the arrest of a key protector, whom he identified as Stanko Ristic, was devastating. “It sent a message to Mladic to run away and hide,” Mr. Vukcevic said. “It was catastrophic.”

After the arrests, one investigator, who said he monitored Mr. Mladic through 2008 outside his apartments, described a fugitive still at large, but in a smaller way, reduced to an ascetic existence in the large, gray towers of New Belgrade, where he could disappear like a ghost.

Mr. Mladic “was very disciplined,” the investigator recalled. “He stayed in his apartment and food and supplies were brought to him. He lived in tall buildings with 40 other apartments in New Belgrade where there are only 54 police officers for 70,000 people. He was never seen leaving the apartment even to go to the park. It was like he was under house arrest.”

Investigators and friends of Mr. Mladic say his network is now likely down to one or two people — deeply loyal associates, with probable links to the former Yugoslav Army — who aid him in a way roughly parallel to what a former protector says was the way Mr. Karadzic was helped.

One of his allies described how Mr. Karadzic shifted among a collection of 12 apartments in New Belgrade once every five months and survived monthly on €200, or about $280, for groceries. Protectors delivered newspapers, bread, even fresh salmon. Funds came from former associates, say friends.

But Mr. Mladic’s life is likely harder. Mr. Karadzic disguised himself as a New Age guru with a bushy beard and circulated in public. Mr. Mladic’s friends said he has refused an elaborate disguise, preferring an underground existence, and that he may be sick.

In a raid in March 2009 on the Bosnian home of Dusan Todic, a former military associate of Mr. Mladic, European Union troops found evidence that Mr. Mladic had used Mr. Todic’s military medical identification to seek care in Serbia.

Is he alive, or dead?

The Serbian authorities, pressed by Western countries since Mr. Karadzic’s arrest in 2008, have clearly been intensifying pressure on Mr. Mladic’s family.

His wife, Bosiljka, whose nervous tick has intensified under constant surveillance, was detained in June and questioned for possessing unregistered weapons that the authorities knew about for years, according to Milos Saljic, the family’s lawyer. Darko, Mr. Mladic’s son, is routinely searched at airports and his computer business clients have been pressured to break contracts, Mr. Saljic added. Darko’s wife, Biljana, was recently fired from a position at the state telecommunications company.

“They want to destroy the family,” Mr. Saljic said, noting that relatives sought a court order to declare him dead to relieve pressure. Prosecutors say the family was really trying to recover assets, including a $50,000 pension, frozen by the state.

Yet some friends insist that Mr. Mladic is indeed dead, having committed suicide to foil the manhunt, or that he will choose to take his life if he cannot thwart an attempted arrest.

The Serbian authorities say that regardless of how the European Union treats Belgrade’s application, they will press for an arrest. “Serbia will bring its international obligations to completion,” Mr. Tadic, the president, wrote in response to written questions.

On a recent, misty, gray afternoon in Srebrenica, rows of marble tombstones were mixed with freshly turned red dirt.

The remains of victims — heads, arms, legs, scattered and concealed by Bosnian Serbian forces — are still being discovered 15 years after the killings.

Serbia Turns Back on Virulent Nationalism

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/world/europe/02iht-serbia.html?_r=1&ref=global-home&pagewanted=print

October 1, 2010

By DAN BILEFSKY

BELGRADE — Only two years ago Aleksandar Vucic, deputy leader of Serbia’s main opposition Progressive Party, was a leading voice of a party that hosted tens of thousands at nationalist rallies where indicted war criminals spoke and participants sang rousing songs vowing to fight to the last drop of blood for Kosovo.

Now, a chastened Mr. Vucic flies to Brussels and Washington for meetings with European and American diplomats and talks on Serbia’s inevitable path toward the European Union and the West.

“We can’t prosper without the E.U. and the E.U. integration process,” said Mr. Vucic, newly retooled as a moderate. In his political youth, as information minister under the Serbian former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, he imposed punishing fines on independent journalists who opposed the regime.

Mr. Vucic acknowledges what veteran opposition leaders dared to voice as long ago as the late 1980s, when Mr. Milosevic was ascendant and the destruction of Yugoslavia loomed.

“The biggest problem in Serbia is not Kosovo,” Mr. Vucic said in an interview. “It is the Serbian economy, unemployment, corruption, and low living standards.”

Twenty-five years after Serbian intellectuals and politicians began brewing the Serbs’ deep historical attachment to Kosovo into a toxic chauvinism that stoked years of war,,, Serbia is shedding virulent nationalism. It is a fundamental shift in the political landscape of a poor but still worldly Balkan country newly determined to integrate with Europe.

With the global financial crisis roiling economies across the western Balkans, the impulse to end isolation and join the European Union is felt across the region. From Macedonia to Montenegro to Kosovo, governments look to Brussels in hope that stronger integration with the world’s biggest trading bloc will help deliver economic salvation.

Across the border in Bosnia, the prospect of joining the European Union could help bind the fragile multiethnic country together after the economy shrank 3.4 percent last year. Yet analysts fear that parliamentary and presidential elections on Sunday may accentuate ethnic divisions, making European integration even more elusive.

Indeed, Bosnia could even break apart, with the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik, making ever louder noises about tearing down the ineffectual, byzantine institutional arrangement that diplomats cobbled together in 1995 to halt three and a half years of war in the heart of Europe.

Other remnants of the old Yugoslavia, however, are doing better. Slovenia is a prospering member of the E.U. and NATO; Croatia, its southern neighbor, hopes to follow it into the Union. Montenegro, small and mired by organized crime, is still on an upward trajectory. Even fledgling Kosovo, desperately poor and struggling to overcome corruption, is finally gaining greater international legitimacy.

In Serbia , cautious optimism is growing. In October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is expected to visit Belgrade and to reaffirm Washington’s support for a Serbia firmly ensconced in European structures. That support has particular resonance given America’s role, when Mrs. Clinton’s husband was president, in leading the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, which aimed to stop Mr. Milosevic’s repression of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.

The hope that Serbia has entered a new era in relations with the West was fanned on Sept. 9 when Belgrade supported a compromise United Nations resolution on Kosovo that dropped its earlier demand to reopen talks on the status of its former territory.

Instead, senior Serbian officials have backed the idea of E.U.-mediated talks with Kosovo, which declared independence from Serbia in February 2008 with the firm backing of the United States and a majority of E.U. nations.

The compromise marked a significant climb-down for the government in Belgrade, which has made joining the E.U. its overriding goal, even as it has remained unequivocal that it considers Kosovo its medieval heartland and has fought an unsuccessful campaign to have Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence deemed illegal. (In July the international Court of Justice in The Hague said it did not breach international law).

Days later, Serbia announced that it had indicted nine Serbian former paramilitaries known as the Jackals over the killing of 43 ethnic Albanians during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

Many Western observers here interpreted the indictments as the latest sign that the determination of Belgrade to join the E.U. was finally coaxing Serbia into a reckoning about its role in the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s.

While Serbia has yet to seize Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose arrest is a condition for Serbia to join the E.U., the Serbian Parliament in April passed a resolution condemning Mr. Mladic’s most heinous crime: the mass murder of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. In a country where Mr. Mladic is still seen by many as a hero, the resolution was bold.

Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said a conjunction of political, economic and social circumstances had made Mr. Mladic’s arrest possible, while easing the country’s path toward the west.

“Politicians across the spectrum have given a clear message related to Mladic that says cooperation with The Hague is a priority,” she said, referring to the international war crimes court. “This has not been met with the resistance or demonstrations of the past because ordinary people are fed up with Serbia’s isolation. This is a fundamental change.”

Underlying the about-face in Serbian politics, analysts say, is the country’s pragmatic President Boris Tadic, a bland but telegenic former psychology teacher who has become a favorite in Brussels and Washington.

While Mr. Tadic has long supported the European Union, analysts noted that the more surprising development is the transformation of former arch-nationalists like Mr. Vucic.

Mr. Vucic explained that cold-headed economic pragmatism was trumping the nationalism of the past. He noted that about 60 percent of Serbs supported E.U. accession and were willing to compromise in return for economic prosperity.

Last year, Serbia, with foreign investment drying up and tax revenue waning, turned to the International Monetary Fund for a €3 billion bailout.

As other ex-communist countries now in the E.U. and NATO have prospered, the average monthly wage in Serbia is about 320 euros, one of the lowest in Europe. Unemployment in April was officially 19.2 percent.

While economic pain may have produced a more conciliatory stance, Serbian observers and western diplomats stressed that key challenges remained, particularly Kosovo and handing Mr. Mladic over to the international court.

Tellingly, the recent U.N. General Assembly session on Kosovo was delayed for three hours after Serbian officials balked at even being in the same room as their ethnic Albanian counterparts. (==>. is it like Cubans walking out when US is set to speak ? )

==============

so ,,, ready to abolish death penalty?

one of the reason for the collapse of Italy economy was that it was not ready for EURO. By the same token, since Italy was bound by EURO, it was hard to enforce any monetary policy or reform effective only within its territory.

Serbia will benefit from the integration into EU. But what about on the part of EU?

ECHR is propped up in terms of compliance rate. I suspect Russia is below the average in that regard. What would it be like if Serbia joined the regime - most effectively enforced and deeply internalized regime ?