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:

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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:

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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.

Karadzic, on the run 13 years, finally arrested

Kurt Bassuener July 22nd, 2008

Note - Scott Lang authored the post below, and asked me to to post it on his behalf - KB 

 

Bosnian Serb war-time President Radovan Karadžic was arrested in Serbia, Serbian President Boris Tadic announced and ICTY Prosecutor Serge Brammertz

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Indicted on two counts of genocide, Karadžic fomented nationalist fear throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina to divide this multi-cultural land by igniting ethnic Serb militancy to forcefully expel non-Serb neighbors, besieging the capital Sarajevo for nearly 4 years and massacring unarmed boys and men at the UN ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica. This long delayed arrest, akin in importance to Eichmann’s post-WWII, is a massive step forward for the justice process in the Balkans where thousands of murders have gone unaccounted for, their murderers unpunished. Coming on the heels of the 13th anniversary of the genocide at Srebrenica where recently discovered victim remains are reburied annually, Karadžic’s impunity from the ICTY court was part of mockery and contempt extreme Serb nationalists held for victims as well as for reckoning with the truth. Karadžic’s incarceration follows a long string of Serbian leaders cum mass murders heading to the court such as RS wartime MoI chief Stojan Župljanin, Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Šešelj, former Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic, former RS president and former RS assembly speaker Momcilo Krajišnik. Yet Karadžic’s terrorizing of Bosnian civilians was made possible only through the passivity and fecklessness of the world’s democracies who stood idly by as Karadžic ethnically cleansed Eastern Bosnia in 1992 and then bleed this diverse land for four more years. It was IFOR that refused to arrest him and it was the Dayton Peace Accords that solidify division and the gains of his genocidal project.

Therefore in Karadžic’s capture, Serbs, who like all former Yugoslav citizens, have suffered so dearly since the Cold War’s end, have an unprecedented chance to come to reckoning with crimes carried out in the name of their culture, history and religion by rejecting exclusive nationalism based upon bloodlines. Equally important, we internationals can use this opportunity to redouble our efforts at bringing about the capture of remaining ICTY indictees VRS commander Ratko Mladic and RSK leader Goran Hadžic and globally learning the lesson of never again by making the ICC indictment of Sudan’s president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has also orchestrated the murder of thousands of Muslims, more than an empty gesture.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina Radovan Karadžic caused so many tears, robbed so many of their basics freedoms, yet today tears of relief and love shall flow for all that was taken but must never be forgotten.

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.