TEN and a half million Serbs and Montenegrins yesterday began to pay the price for the crimes alleged to have been committed by two men, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic. The European Union abandoned talks on Serbia’s accession because of the failure of the Belgrade authorities to arrest and hand over Mladic.
Brussels and the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague were told that Mladic, the man charged with ordering the July 1995 Srebrencia massacre of 7000 Bosnian Muslims, would be detained by the end of March. Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica who, when president in 2001, resisted moves to hand over Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague tribunal, persuaded the EU negotiators to allow another month and called on the hunted man to surrender. Still nothing happened. Yesterday a final EU deadline ran out.
Despite earlier suggestions to the contrary, Brussels has not slammed the door finally on Serbian accession. Negotiations will resume when Mladic is handed over. But it is clear that any resumed talks are likely to be a good deal tougher than if the Serbians had honored the original deal.
It is absolutely right that the EU has taken such a strong stance. There is, however, a point of view that the negotiations should never even have started at all until Belgrade had fulfilled the requirements of international justice in apprehending its war criminals. Brussels was clearly swayed by the fact that the Serbian authorities last December gave information that led to the arrest in Spain of Milan Martic, a Serb from Croatia wanted for war crimes committed against Croats. The false assumption was that this was the start of a dragnet that would bring in all the wanted men.
Radovan Karadzic is widely believed to be hiding in the Serbian enclave in Bosnia, where he is protected by a network of friends and relatives. Mladic, on the other hand, was a regular officer in the old Yugoslav Army. It is elements within what are now Serbia’s armed forces that have sheltered him. Yet intelligence reports suggest this protective screen has now disintegrated and Mladic is on his own. If this is true, there is even less reason for the Serbian authorities to have failed to arrest the man.
Serbia may be at a dangerous tipping point. Historically Serbs have honored brutal bandits, even making them rival kings as they pursued their highly independent struggle against Turks, Hungarians, Austrians and their fellow Slavs, the Croatians and Bosnians, who had converted respectively to Roman Catholicism and Islam. It was a Serb who fired the assassin’s bullet in 1914 at Sarajevo that plunged the world into four years of war that left over ten million dead and 20 million wounded.
The EU’s abandonment of accession talks may harden, rather than change, Serb hearts. A new nationalism may arise which will once again threaten the peace and stability of the Balkans. Nevertheless, what Brussels has done had to be done. All Balkan war crimes suspects must be brought to trial.
