Serbia’s European choice By David Gowan ★ Serbia has become the most intractable obstacle to stability and progress in the Western Balkans. Deep-seated nationalism stands in the way of finding a sustainable solution to Kosovo and dealing with indicted war criminals. This reluctance frustrates Serbia’s professed aim of joining the EU. ★ Martti Ahtisaari’s plan to give ‘supervised independence’ to Kosovo appears the only fair and workable way forward. Serbia’s insistence of transferring sovereignty over the province back to Belgrade is simply out of touch with reality. ★ The EU must stand ready to encourage and reward any real shift in Belgrade’s stance. After the resumption of association talks, early candidate status should also be on offer. But Serbia must earn this by consistently demonstrating European values and behaviour. Serbia, like its neighbours, went through tremendous t u rmoil and suffering during the bloody conflicts of the 1990s that accompanied and followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Since the overthrow of its war-time president, the late Slobodan Milosevic, in 2000, Serbia has seen much pro g ress towards political stability and economic prosperity. A new, pro E u ropean prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, seemed d e t e rmined to root out the country’s powerful criminal establishment and more generally m o d e rnise his country. He was assassinated in M a rch 2003. Subsequent governments have shown much less enthusiasm for taking reforms forward. In the 2003 election, the ultra-nationalist Radical part y gained the single largest share of the vote but was kept out of power by an unstable minority g o v e rnment made up of four parties, most notably the centre-right Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) led by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.
including the DSS and two smaller parties. This government could bring opportunities for real progress towards the EU – but only if the Serbs prove ready to break with the past.
In the latest parliamentary election in January 2007, the Radicals once again won the single largest share of the vote, and now control a third of parliamentary seats. It took more than three months of wrangling before the two large (and at least nominally) reformist parties could agree on a coalition to keep the Radicals out of office. On May 15th, a broad-based coalition took power, led by the centre-left Democratic Party (DS) and
The make-up of the new government also gives the EU a glimmer of hope that Serbia may ultimately become more willing to negotiate on the question of Kosovo’s ‘final status’, which is coming to a head in the UN Security Council. So far, Belgrade’s main aim has been to discredit a plan for ‘supervised independence’, put forward by the UN Secretary General’s special envoy, Martti Ahtisaari. Some 90 per cent of Kosovo’s two million inhabitants are
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The EU immediately signalled that it was willing to resume talks on a stabilisation and association agreement (SAA), provided Belgrade lives up to its commitments to co-operate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In May 2006, the EU had suspended the negotiations on the SAA, the signing of which would be an important step on the way towards EU accession. EU officials said at the time that the Serbian government was not fully cooperating in securing the arrest of the fugitives Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, both charged with some of the gravest war crimes in Europe since the Second World War.
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