New DPC op-ed on Dutch, EU policy on Serbia
Eric Witte September 15th, 2008
UPDATE: A Dutch translation of the op-ed is now available here.
UPDATE II: A translation in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is now available here [PDF].
Kurt and I have a new op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal Europe, arguing that when EU foreign ministers meet today, the Dutch should continue to hold out against pressure from EU foreign policy officials and other member states to reward Serbia with implementation of an interim agreement (which contains many benefits of Serbia’s held-up Stabilization and Association Agreement). The Dutch have taken the position that implementation of the interim agreement, like that of the SAA itself, must await Serbia’s full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). We argue that this is not only in the interests of justice, but also Serbia’s democratic reform:
When applied, conditionality requires Serbia to prove its willingness to enter Europe’s community of common values. It also has afforded Serbia’s democrats an opportunity to outflank nationalist opponents. Quietly, Serbian officials admit this. But politicians everywhere avoid heavy lifting when given the chance. The EU has repeatedly granted this chance, retarding Serbia’s democratic development and demonstrating that their definition of conditionality is itself conditional.
Serbian reformers now in power continue to argue against EU conditionality. But President Boris Tadic and Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic reaped substantial political benefits from the Karadzic arrest. The aftermath of the arrest revealed the ultranationalist Radical Party’s inability to create significant protests. The Socialist Party, drawn into coalition with Mr. Tadic’s Democrats, is accused of “treason” by the Radical Party and its other erstwhile nationalist allies and wants to avoid new elections. This makes Serbia’s current coalition its most stable in the post-Milosevic era.
Belgrade can finish the job by arresting Mladic and Croatian Serb separatist leader Goran Hadzic. Mladic’s whereabouts have been less mysterious than Karadzic’s were, but in some ways his is a harder case. He enjoys greater loyalty among nationalists and elements of the military and intelligence services, who help to protect him and could lash out following an arrest. But this, too, provides the Tadic government with an opportunity to root out elements that have long proved lethal to reform. Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic’s assassination in 2003 demonstrated the cost of delaying a purge that should have begun after Milosevic’s ouster in 2000.
The security-criminal nexus burdens Serbia with organized crime and corruption that make later fulfillment of EU-required technical reforms more difficult in any case. Now is the best — and perhaps only — time to confront it, while radical elements in Serbian society are in disarray and demoralized by the arrest of Karadzic, and soon after the electorate has demonstrated its preference for pro-European policies. Waiting to tackle the hardest reforms will only give the hard-liners time to regroup. Dutch resolve on EU conditionality has given Mr. Tadic another chance to clean house and to justify arrests to an electorate that expects him to take bold steps to meet European standards.
You can read the whole thing here.
Messrs Witte and Bassuener (The Low Countries take the high road, Wall Street Journal, September 15, 2008) claim that Dutch intransigence to unlock the EU trade agreement with Serbia rests on some higher moral grounds of which (we are to learn) the Dutch government is the custodian. Nothing could be further from the truth. Had the Dutch government really wanted to show that it takes its international role and morality in politics and war seriously, it would have put to trial its officers who, by their inaction, allowed the appalling crime at Srebrenica to take place. They were indeed accomplices of General Mladic whom they currently insist to see, at any cost, at the Hague. But clearly the Dutch politicians and officers regarded their own lives as too valuable to be sacrificed fighting for what they were ostensibly trying to achieve in Bosnia.
Secondly, the Dutch government had a chance recently when the family survivors of the victims of Srebrenica raised the issues of financial compensation for the Dutch dereliction of duty, to show that they take the issue seriously and are willing to share the moral blame. But they decided that Dutch troops cannot be held liable for what they did, or failed to do, on an international mission. If so, the troops should not have been sent there in the first since they were not serious about their duties.
Thirdly, one marvels how the Dutch government can claim to uphold international law when it is simultaneously trying as forcefully as possibly to prevent Serbia for asking the International Court’s opinion on the legality of Kosovo’s secession (which the Netherlands promptly recognized). If they believe in international law and believe that their decision was a correct what do they fear?
In reality, Dutch intransigence has only one cause: it is to deflect the blame from their own culpability. They were the willing enablers of the crime.