New DPC Policy Brief - Rethinking US Policy toward the Western Balkans

Kurt Bassuener February 17th, 2009

DPC Senior Associate James Lyon has written a Policy Brief on the still unstable situation in the Western Balkans, and the need for re-engagement by the Unitied States through a Presidential Special Envoy.  A brief description of the policy brief is below, with a link to the full paper:

Euro-Atlantic policies towards the Western Balkans have reached the limits of their effectiveness, as countries throughout the region have hit a brick wall in the reform and European integration process. It is time to examine the effectiveness of the western alliance’s policy approach towards the Western Balkans and adjust it to meet new realities.This paper examines the challenges facing the western alliance in the Balkans, the limits of international influence under current policy, and the options available to enhance progress in the region. It offers five policy recommendations that will, if implemented, substantially alter the policy dynamic and assist the Euro-Atlantic alliance to stabilize the region and move it forward in the European accession process without substantial new resources. It also argues that little progress will occur in the region until the United States resumes its leadership role.Recommendations:

  1. The United States (US) needs to re-engage diplomatically in the region by appointing a Special Presidential Envoy to the Balkans.
  2. The practice of “dual-hatting” European Union Special Representatives with functions of non-EU missions should cease, particularly in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
  3. The US and European Union (EU) should resist the temptation to further draw down troop levels either in Kosovo or Bosnia, and the US should reinsert a flag-level officer in NATO headquarters in Sarajevo.
  4. Both the EU and US should treat all countries equally, stop giving Serbia preferential treatment and refuse to lower standards, especially regarding corruption.
  5. The EU and US should engage on assuring energy security to the region, by expediting the Nabucco pipeline and including a spur into the Western Balkans.

The full brief is available in PDF at the link below:

DPC Policy Brief - Rethinking US Policy toward the Western Balkans

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.

New DPC article: Giving Bosnian victims a name

Eric Witte August 25th, 2008

Radovan Karadzic has his second court appearance this week at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, when he will have another opportunity to enter a plea.  (He refused to do so at his first appearance.) Karadzic is charged with crimes across Bosnia and Hercegovina, including the July 1995 massacre by Serb forces of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in and around the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica. 

On Sunday, Kurt had an article in the St. Petersburg Times, which offers a bleak but fascinating look at the tremendous effort by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) to account for Srebrenica’s victims:

In ICMP’s mortuary in Tuzla the air hangs thick and musty - the dank odor of mortal remains excavated from mass graves, placed in numbered plastic burlap sacks, stacked seven high and 15 wide. Brown paper bags of clothing found on or with the remains, also carefully labeled, top the shelving. A neighboring room contains personal effects, such as walking canes, ID cards and canteens.

In many cases, the whole male line of a family was wiped out. Just last month, on the 13th anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, 308 bodies found in mass graves and identified by the ICMP were reburied.

…

The center painstakingly links the remains of individuals killed at the same execution sites but spread among many secondary mass graves. The bones of some 140 individuals were laid out on long tables and shelves in the large room, each bone and fragment individually marked with a numbered foil tag. The skeletons of three brothers are laid out side by side. DNA from parents can only ensure identification as a child, but not which one absent other data. Two of four missing brothers could be positively identified by other distinguishing features, relative age, or because they themselves had children with matching DNA. But one partial skeleton could only be narrowed down to brother number three or four. More evidence is needed to positively identify him.

Every year on July 11, the remains of those identified are buried at Potocari, near Srebrenica. Families have sole discretion as to whether to bury a loved one who has been only partially found. Great is the trauma suffered by some who have buried a loved one only to find more remains later, and face the choice of disinterring the previously identified remains. ICMP refrains from contacting families until a significant amount of remains have been identified.

The man who was in operational command at Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic, remains at large in Serbia.  European Union foreign ministers meet next month, with Serbia again on the agenda.  Karadzic’s arrest would likely not have been possible without Dutch and Belgian insistence on Serbia’s full cooperation with the ICTY prior to implementation of its Stabilization and Association Agreement and other EU benefits.  As Kurt argues, the pressure should be maintained:

Will the man accused of being operationally responsible for creating the tangle of human remains that is still being sifted ever see justice? That largely depends on the continued lonely leadership of the Dutch and Belgian governments, and the readiness of those, including the U.S. government, who bankroll the international tribunal to continue financing its work until justice is done.

Keep EU agreement with Serbia on hold

Eric Witte August 8th, 2008

Kurt has a letter in today’s Financial Times in response to an op-ed last week written by Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic.  Djelic argued that with Serbia’s arrest of Radovan Karadzic, it was time to place the relationship between the EU and Belgrade on new footing by dropping policies of conditionality.  He argued that the EU should approve Serbia’s Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) and advance it to the status of a candidate for EU membership, as well as immediately implement visa liberalization.

In his letter, Kurt argues that it was Dutch and Belgian insistance on Serbia’s cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a prerequisite to SAA approval that led to Karadzic’s arrest, and that this policy should remain in place until the final two remaining fugitives are apprehended:

Sir, Bozidar Djelic, deputy prime minister of Serbia, asserts that it is time for the European Union to approach Serbia with a new policy of disciplined partnership between the EU and Serbia [which] yields much better results than the old one, based on conditionality and sanctions (“For the good of Europe give Serbia a chance”, August 4).

Yet it is precisely the application of conditionality, insisted upon by only two of the 27 EU member states – the Netherlands and Belgium – that compelled President Boris Tadic to arrest and transfer Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, to face trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Had it been up to the other 25 and the EU machinery, that condition would have been waived, the stabilisation and association agreement’s interim benefits activated, and the process of ratification would have begun. The message is not that conditionality failed, but rather that it works when firmly applied.

None of this diminishes the credit to Serbia’s government for the arrest and handover of a man indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Nor does it undercut the need for a credible membership perspective for Serbia and its western Balkan neighbours Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia and Albania.

It does appear that the Serbian government is approaching the search for the remaining indictees – Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and Croatian Serb political leader Goran Hadzic – with greater vigour with the installation of the new government. President Tadic has reaped domestic political advantages from the arrest of Mr Karadzic, helping him paint his Radical opposition as weak and binding the Socialists in his coalition ever closer, since their erstwhile allies and much of the party rank and file view the Karadzic arrest as treason.

Serbia is being given a chance by the EU, despite Mr Djelic’s aggrieved whimpering about unfair treatment. Serbia will prove its readiness for “partnership” with the EU when it arrests and transfers Mr Mladic and Mr Hadzic. Until then, the EU should not move forward on SAA implementation or ratification, let alone moving forward towards candidate status.

It would be best for Belgrade and Brussels if these loose ends were finally tied up by the time of visits by Serge Brammertz, the ICTY chief prosecutor, later this month.

Serbia likely to put EU conditionality to the test

Eric Witte July 15th, 2008

In an interview with a Serbian newspaper, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has described Serbia’s progress toward EU membership in remarkably sensible terms: “This is not a process that is led based on a calendar, but in which progress depends on full completion of clearly defined conditions.”  The Commission may just be reflecting the backbone displayed by The Netherlands and Belgium in refusing to ratify Serbia’s Stabilization and Association Agreement until Belgrade fully cooperates with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).  In the same newspaper interview cited by Serbian broadcaster B92, Rehn specifies that “Serbia needs to have full cooperation with the international court in The Hague. We are calling on the new government to continue to improve the positive development of the situation and to take all necessary steps towards achieving this condition.”

If this is in fact the EU’s new policy on Serbia, it would be a welcome development.  In the past, EU “conditionality” often has been muddied by shifting goalposts and capitulation to nationalist obstinance.  Comments also reported in B92 from Serbia’s new interior minister - the head of former President Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia - indicate that EU resolve is likely to be tested again.  Minister Ivica Dacic’s contempt for the tribunal could hardly be clearer: “”I don’t think that the Hague cooperation is a priority, because, miserable is any state that makes this a priority - to cooperate with the Hague!”  He goes on to traffic in unfounded craziness about how the ICTY has killed Serb detainees who have died of natural causes while in custody.  Dacic does, however, acknowledge that cooperation with the ICTY is Serbia’s international legal obligation.  Whether he and other members of the government act on that obligation is likely to be determined by EU policy. 

Three ICTY fugitives remain at large: Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, and Goran Hadzic.  Clint Williamson, the U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, told a Sarajevo daily on Monday that top fugitives Karadzic and Mladic are believed to be in Serbia. 

Genocide charges against Bashir: justice and peace in Sudan

Eric Witte July 11th, 2008

The Washington Post is reporting this morning that on Monday, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court will seek Darfur-related charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The United Nations is grappling with how the Sudanese regime might react, including by possibly targeting peacekeepers or cutting off their supplies. Likewise, humanitarian aid organizations worry about their access to people in need being cut off.

These are serious concerns, as is the major question examined in today’s New York Times about how the charges (there is no formal “indictment” at the ICC) could affect the tenuous north-south peace and what remains of the peace process in Darfur.

In different contexts, this is the same question that surrounded the indictments of Serbian and Liberian presidents Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1999 and Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2003, respectively. A major after-effect of those indictments was to make the rule of Milosevic and Taylor no longer tenable, and diminished their ability to string along negotiators ad infinitum as suited their power interests. Thus, Milosevic was no longer able to wine and dine Richard Holbrooke and maintain his position as the perceived go-to guy for stability in the Balkans. Likewise, the absurd merry-go-round of broken peace and cease-fire arrangements - interspersed by additional negotiations when Taylor felt pressure to regroup and re-arm - came to an abrupt end in Liberia following the unsealing of his war crimes indictment. In Serbia, this meant that Serbs saw their futures tied to that of a pariah. This helped to motivate the civic uprising that overthrew Milosevic after he tried to steal another round of elections in October 2000. In Liberia, it led to international demands that Taylor leave power and the country as an essential component of any peace deal.

The Milosevic and Taylor indictments also led to increased media and high-level political attention for the crises in Serbia and Liberia. In the New York Times piece linked above, Sudan expert Alex de Waal worries that “[Bashir] is prone to irrational outbursts and could respond in a very aggressive way.” That’s quite possible, and greater instability in the short term is a real danger.  But de Waal himself has a smart post up at the Africa Policy Forum blog, arguing that Sudan requires diplomatic attention at a higher order of magnitude. Charges against Bashir could not only create accountability for atrocities in Darfur, but bring increased political resources to bear on the Sudanese crises.  This could lead the international community beyond tactical crisis management, and into the realm of strategic thinking backed by requisite resources to forge a more durable peace.

Srebrenica - 13th Anniversary

Andrej Nosov July 10th, 2008

On the eve of the 13th Anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, Serbian human rights organizations demand

Serbia Arrest Persons Indicted for Genocide

This year we mark 60 years since the adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It especially obliges us to remind the President of Serbia, the Prime Minister, ministers, and members of the Serbian Parliament, religious leaders and the faithful, leaders and members of political parties, associations, unions, professors, students, youth, and all citizens of Serbia that our country has not yet fulfilled its obligations relative to the International Court of Justice judgement on the violations/non-abidance of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The International Court of Justice rendered a decision on 27 February 2007 establishing that Serbia had violated its obligation to prevent genocide (in accordance with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), in view of the genocide committed in Srebrenica in July 1995. The court stated that Serbia had violated its obligation which originates from the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide because it did not extradite Ratko Mladi?, indicted for genocide and complicity in genocide, to stand trial before the Hague Tribunal, hence it has not fully cooperated with the Tribunal.

On 27 February 2007, the Court rendered a decision obliging Serbia to instantly take efficient steps to fully respect its obligation towards the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to punish the act of genocide and extradite persons indicted for genocide to stand trial before the Hague Tribunal and therefore complete the cooperation with this Tribunal. Since then, Serbia has taken no steps to arrest persons indicted for the most grievous crime of all war crimes, rather it has continued protecting Hague indictees from criminal liability.

Human rights nongovernmental organizations call upon the authorities of the Republic of Serbia to implement the verdict of the International Court of Justice regarding the arrest of Ratko Mladi? and other Hague indictees, Radovan Karadži? and Goran Hadži?, and in so doing cease violating provisions of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the right of victims’ families to justice.

11 July, the anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, is approaching and this date obliges especially us, the citizens, and the authorities in Serbia, to show that victims are important. It also obliges Serbia to accept responsibility for the injustice caused to the victims in July 1995.

Humanitarian Law Center
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights
Youth Initiative for Human Rights
YUCOM Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights
Women in Black
Queeria Centre
Centre for Cultural Decontamination

New DPC op-ed on the EU and Serbia

Eric Witte May 29th, 2008

Kurt has an op-ed in this week’s European Voice, “Yielding to Serb Demands Won’t Make the EU Credible” [subscription req’d].  He argues that the EU goodies (in the form of a Stabilization and Association Agreement) showered on Belgrade ahead of parliamentary elections on May 11 may have been successful in securing a plurality of the vote for the nominally pro-European party of President Boris Tadic, but conveyed the message that Serbia need not make difficult sacrifices in order to join the EU.

The problem is that Tadic and his party clearly want EU membership on Serbia’s terms, not the EU’s. Tadic’s explicit position - inconvenient and not addressed in Brussels at all - is that Serbia wants to get into the EU to ensure that an independent Kosovo can never join, and once Serbia is in, it can reclaim Kosovo.

Had Tadic levelled with the Serbian people and told them EU membership meant facing the reality of Kosovo’s independence and the transfer of ‘heroes’ such as Ratko Mladic, the fugitive Bosnian Serb general, to the Inter-national Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the ‘referendum on Europe’ would have been real.

EU credibility is falling across the region as a result of its coddling of recalcitrant policies from Belgrade:

The EU’s unseemly fixation on getting Tadic re-elected also deepened the perception across the region that Serbia always comes first, whether it fulfils explicit conditions or not. Others, like fragile but neglected Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Macedonia, are treated as afterthoughts.

The mood music in European foreign ministries is weariness with the whole tiresome imbroglio. Brussels favours a tacit acceptance that Serbia has to be rewarded for choosing the “European path”, ie, its performance should be graded positively, whatever the reality. Tadic will lobby hard for this.

If the EU gives in, the outcome risks bearing little resemblance to a ‘European Serbia’. Rather, the Union will be further debased as a credible policy actor, so desperate for ‘progress’ that it willingly accepts a Potemkin version as the real thing.

As Serbia’s government falls, international media rediscover a Serb nationalist

Eric Witte March 8th, 2008

Serbia’s government fell today.  This comes in the wake of Kosovo’s independence on February 17 and the subsequent burning of the unprotected US embassy, as well as mob attacks on the embassies and diplomatic missions of Slovenia, the UK, Germany, Croatia and Bosnia. It also comes amidst government incitement to intimidate civil society and pro-western liberals, and Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica’s effort to spurn Serbia’s path to EU integration absent a full reversal of EU members’ recognition of independent Kosovo.  International media are struggling to understand the current crisis and how Serbia has come to the brink of another era of ultranationalist governance - this time under Kostunica, likely in alliance with the Radical Party.

Jovana Gec, writing for the Associated Press yesterday explained that Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica had come “full circle”, turning into a politician very much like Milosevic, whom he succeeded as president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in October 2000. Part of this assessment points to a shift in Kostunica’s personal and governing style since 2000 - moving away from his everyman reputation and adopting Milosevic’s more reclusive and authoritarian habits. While this much rings true, the notion emphasized through much of the article - and reflected in many western news accounts these days - that Kostunica’s embrace of nationalism is surprising, or even something new, ignores his consistent public record.

Vojislav Kostunica has not suddenly become a nationalist. Rather, the media - and most of the western diplomatic corps - are only now being forced to abandon their delusions that he was ever a “moderate”.

Before and since Kosovo’s independence on February 17, Kostunica has done his best to whip the masses into a nationalist frenzy with fiery rhetoric that would make Milosevic proud. But anyone caring to dig into the record would realize that during the 1990s Milosevic’s rhetoric and actions were not always enough to satisfy Kostunica’s nationalist fervor. Take for example, this interview from December 1994, during the war in Bosnia, when Kostunica was asked whether Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had made any mistakes:

“I do not see anything which I would call a basic error…There was, truth to say, a mistake linked with the assessment that one could rely on the national positions and the national interests of the regime in Belgrade…and that the [Milosevic] regime was conducting a responsible national policy. He [Milosevic] is…a cynical, not a true, nationalist.” — Interview with NIN, December 2, 1994, cited in Norman Cigar, Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s Future, p. 17.

In other words, Karadzic had not made a mistake in leading the ongoing siege of Sarajevo and wholesale ethnic cleansing of eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, among a series of other atrocities; rather Kostunica thought his mistake had been to overestimate the (already substantial) support that the Bosnian Serbs could count on from Milosevic in carrying out these crimes. In this same interview, Kostunica summed up by saying, “[…]the requests by the leadership of the Republika Srpska at this stage are directed toward an objective which for us is legitimate and not debatable.”

Leaving no doubt of his support for the Greater Serbia project, or his criticism of Milosevic in working towards this goal, shortly after the slaughter at Srebrenica in 1995, Kostunica explained:

“[Milosevic and] the so-called opposition in Serbia [share a limited perspective] based on the old, never corroborated myth that Serbia across the Drina is up for dispute, [that it is] Greater Serbia, while Serbia up to the Drina, if possible reduced in the North and South in its head and legs, is the true, allowable, Serbia. Of course, ever since Yugoslavia has been in existence, Serbia has been a single indivisible space on both sides of the Drina, and the Serbs here and over there are a single and the same people. Notwithstanding what foreigners and domestic peaceniks have thought and said, peace can be established more quickly by accepting this natural fact than by rejecting it.” — Interview with NIN, July 28, 1995, cited in Norman Cigar, Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s Future, p. 20. 

Kostunica’s disappointment in Milosevic extended to the latter’s support for the so-called Republika Sprska Krajina in Croatia, again because Kostunica felt Milosevic had failed to do enough to support the separatists working to implement the plan for a Greater Serbia in that part of the former Yugoslavia:

“[Milosevic is responsible for] the betrayal of the Republika Srpska Krajina…It is difficult to find an explanation for such a Pilate-like avoidance of moral and even legal obligations.” — Quoted in the periodical Argument, August 14, 1995, cited in Norman Cigar, Vojislav Kostunica and Serbia’s Future, p. 8. 

In 2000 the opposition coalesced around Kostunica because his nationalist credentials allowed for creation of a much broader anti-Milosevic coalition than had the liberal, pro-western opposition centered on Zoran Djindjic. The strategy worked. Kostunica and such other anti-Milosevic nationalist leaders as Velimir Ilic, then the mayor of Cacak and today Kostunica’s infrastructure minister, expanded the opposition movement to critical mass. Many (and perhaps most) of the Serbs who took to the streets of Belgrade in October 2000 did so not because Milosevic had started wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, but rather because he had lost them.

October 5, 2000 was only a partial revolution. Milosevic was toppled, and that was important, but there was not yet a commitment to liberal democracy - and Kostunica’s commitment to chauvinist nationalism remained. But because Kostunica had been anti-Milosevic, and because the scenes in Belgrade recalled the democratic revolutions across Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the Cold War, the media and western diplomatic community assiduously embraced Kostunica as a moderate and a democrat, lumping him together with such true democrats as Zoran Djindjic.

During the 1990s, the western media often had described Kostunica as a “nationalist”. The Associated Press did so on August 10, 1995 when it quoted him as saying, “Milosevic has sold out the Serbs.” (Link unavailable.) That it is now rediscovering Kostunica’s nationalism is a sign that it has come full circle, while Kostunica has remained much the same.