Serbia-EU relations set to improve ahead of Kosovo decision

After Serbia helped arrest a key war-crimes fugitive last week, the EU has promised to resume integration talks.

from the June 5, 2007 edition

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"There's a view by some European states that they needed to give something to Serbia, while we very much believe that the credibility of the EU lies in its remaining firm, as opposed to going back on its words," says Geraldine Mattioli, an international-justice advocate with Human Rights Watch in Brussels. "We are afraid that the European Union is letting go of a key leverage that they had with Serbia."

That leverage on both Serbia and Croatia produced a wave of so-called voluntary surrenders of more than one dozen Serb suspects in 2004 and 2005, as well as the arrest of fugitive Croatian Gen. Ante Gotovina. The voluntary surrenders, which involved under-the-radar police action and the financial rewards from the Serbian government to the families of fugitives who turned themselves in, had echoes in the arrest of Tolimir.

The former assistant intelligence commander of the Bosnian Serb Army's main staff was arrested just over the border in the eastern Bosnian hinterlands – though several sources last year said he was ill at home in the Serbian capital.

"If Tolimir's as sick as we've been led to believe, it's incredulous to believe that he was in Bratunac. It's not a health spa," says Kurt Basseuner, a Sarajevo-based senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council advocacy group. Mr. Basseuner also criticizes Serbia's new National Security Council, chaired by pro-Western president Boris Tadic, as "a smiling happy facade on a government that's had little change," because the interior ministry is still run by hardliners who have shown no interest in cooperating with the tribunal.

While he and other critics inside and outside Serbia doubt that much will move forward on war-crimes fugitives if the EU's conditionality is removed, the arrest of Tolimir makes one thing certain about any future arrests of fugitives. "You can almost guarantee that they will not be captured in Serbia," Basseuner says.

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