Banja Luka or Brussels? Belgrade Should be Made to Choose

By: Kurt Bassuener

{artsexylightbox}Bosnian Serb wartime military commander Ratko Mladic, arrested in the Vojvodina village of Lazarevo on May 26, was transferred to the ICTY detention facility at Scheveningen on May 31. His trial on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, whether conjoined with the ongoing trial of Republika Srpska political leader Radovan Karadzic or not, will begin the process of holding Mladic accountable for crimes committed by forces under his command, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre – already ruled an act of genocide by the Tribunal.

As I wrote last week for Balkan Insight,[1] the Serbian government’s arrest of Mladic is proof that conditionality works, so long as it is perceived as credible by those on the receiving end.  Conditionality based on Serbia’s cooperation with the ICTY (as was previously true for Croatia) delivered many indictees, including Karadzic, to The Hague. And as Daniel Serwer notes in his recent blog post on the subject,[2] conditionality in the EU, at least on matters that require unanimous consent by members (like enlargement), can be a source of strength, since only one member can insist that the standard be met. While it was once a more broadly embraced concept within the EU, full ICTY cooperation was a condition upheld in the end only by the Netherlands. Irish parliamentarians in the current government also espoused it as a standard, and it was questionable whether the SAA would have been ratified in the wake of Brammertz’s negative report.  

For years, President Boris Tadic and his government have hoped that the majority view among EU member states – and that of the bureaucracy itself – would prevail over the Dutch position. Had the Brammertz report to the UN Security Council, leaked in advance of its presentation, been more ambiguous on Serbia’s cooperation, this may have been the case. Were the discovery and arrest of Mladic to occur just more than a year from now, he would not have been tried by the ICTY, but by its residual mechanism – allowing the loss of crucial situational background knowledge in the Tribunal. It appears Serbia was attempting to run the clock. However, by last week, the Brammertz report, a firm Dutch parliamentary and government position that this report would be their standard for deciding on whether to ratify Serbia’s SAA and accept it as a candidate, and the potential that Irish legislators may join in this position, amended the calculus. The potential cost to Serbia’s EU aspirations – and the Tadic government’s electoral fortunes in 2012 – was just too high a risk.                     

The Mladic arrest generated little celebration in Sarajevo, unlike the arrest of Karadzic three years ago. The reasons for this differential are difficult for me to grasp, and I’ve yet to hear one that satisfies. Bosnians I’ve spoken with seem puzzled themselves. Perhaps part of the reason is that the overall situation within Bosnia is markedly more negative than it was even three years ago, when this downward trend was well underway but was only two and a half years along and less readily apparent. The future of the country now seems far more uncertain given the demonstrated and protracted unwillingness of the international community to enforce its own rules.  

Yet, the arrest did generate reaction in the form of protests of support for Mladic in Serbia and especially in Republika Srpska. An estimated six to ten thousand supporters attended a protest organized by the Fighters’ Organization of RS (BORS) in Banja Luka, at which protesters held signs aloft and chanted slogans calling Tadic a traitor. BORS President Pantelija Curguz attacked the Tribunal as well as Bosnian state judicial institutions for alleged bias in prosecutions, calling on the European Commission to ensure equal standards of justice. Commissioner Stefan Fule comes to Banja Luka on Monday, June 6 to launch a “structured dialogue” on the justice sector and home affairs with BiH authorities. The visit was announced on May 13, when EU High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy Catherine Ashton went to Banja Luka in an attempt to persuade Dodik to cancel the planned RS referendum on the State Court, State Prosecutor, and High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council. The move was seen by many non-EU Peace Implementation Council members as a unilateral act that undercut the international High Representative, Valentin Inzko, who had called for the referendum and the RSNA’s accompanying conclusions to be withdrawn lest he annul them. While the referendum has been withdrawn by the RSNA (“for now,” as Dodik has said repeatedly[3]), their conclusions remain in force. It is yet to be seen whether the EU will insist on that part of the deal being upheld by Banja Luka before “structured dialogue” is initiated. Given the time allotted, this is unlikely.

It is clear that authorities in the Republika Srpska are uncomfortable about the prospect of both senior Bosnian Serb wartime leaders and RS architects being on trial for genocide. Last year’s declaration by the Serbian parliament on Srebrenica was met with criticism from Banja Luka for singling out the 1995 massacre and undercutting the position of the Republika Srpska. The 2007 International Court of Justice ruling, which stated that Serbia had not done enough to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, also unnerved the RS government, for the implicit responsibility clearly falls onto the RS itself. The fear seems to be that the Republika Srpska’s legitimacy is at stake. It is hard to see how the status of the RS in a Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina could be legally threatened, but perhaps the concern is more over what could happen if the entity were to vie for outright independence. RS President Dodik tried to play both sides in his recent interview on RTS, in which he called  for individual criminal responsibility for crimes committed, but applauded those in the RS who had the “courage to accept the political leadership of the people of the time… I need one day to say that Milosevic and the people at that time did a phenomenal job. Dayton gave us in the RS the opportunity to build its resilience and personality, which we consistently defend.”[4]  

The relationship between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina remains fraught and unhelpfully ambiguous, given Belgrade’s close relationship with Banja Luka. In a leaked diplomatic cable jointly authored by the US embassies in Sarajevo and Belgrade in January 2009,[5] the problem was identified accurately, if more favorably regarding Serbia than was – or is currently – deserved:

Although Bosnia’s state-level ministries have some necessary contacts with Serbia’s, the fact that Belgrade has continued to develop close ties with the RS via the 2006 bilateral Framework for Special Parallel Relations between Serbia and the Republika Srpska may help the RS undermine Bosnia’s state institutions legitimate efforts to exclusively exercise state-level competencies – not least foreign policy…

Belgrade’s focus on cultivating entity-level ties will impede the development of constructive, state-level relations with Sarajevo. Our diplomatic contacts indicate that close relations between Tadic and Dodik have sidelined the Bosnian Embassy and led to the impression that Tadic is conferring de facto recognition of RS independence. Our Bosnian Embassy contacts have complained that Tadic and Dodik have appeared in public events in Belgrade as equals – such as at the opening of the Republika Srpska Park in New Belgrade on April 30 – and that Belgrade has sent ministers to visit Banja Luka without informing Sarajevo. Dodik travels frequently to Belgrade without informing the Bosnian Embassy or using the embassy’s services, according to the Bosnian Embassy, which was not invited to participate in the opening of the RS Representative office in November. Serbian MFA officials have claimed that such treatment is only due to the difficulty of coordinating with Sarajevo, but it continues to be a constant point of grievance.

One of the difficulties Serbian officials and former High Representative Miroslav Lajcak – now Managing Director for Russia, Eastern Neighborhood and the Western Balkans in the European External Action Service – cited as a cause of weak inter-state relations was friction with the then-Bosniak member of the BiH Presidency, Haris Silajdzic. If that was indeed the reason, it is no longer, given his defeat by Bakir Izetbegovic in the 2010 election.  

Commenting in the cable cited above, then-US Ambassador to Serbia Cameron Munter stated his view that “Tadic’s policy represents an important improvement over that of Kostunica, but institutionally Serbia is trying to have it both ways: supporting Dayton and Bosnia’s territorial integrity while lending credibility, even if indirectly, to Dodik’s dangerous rhetoric.” 

Tadic’s support for Dodik was clear in the 2010 campaign. And Dodik’s rhetoric has taken several steps forward in the intervening two and a half years. In an interview published on June 2, 2011, Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic advocated the division of Kosovo between Serbia and Albania, going on to raise the implications for Bosnia: “If tomorrow, the Republika Srpska decides to secede in a referendum, what will they become? An independent state, or will they decide to join with Serbia? …That [would be] natural, because we are same people.”[6]

Openly discussing the carve-up of a state that Belgrade recognizes (and another, Kosovo, recognized by most EU members, which it doesn’t) is hardly good neighborly behavior. At the time of this writing, though, there have been no international condemnations of such dangerous speculation.

The 2009 cable’s executive summary concludes with the assessment that, “Belgrade will continue to be a responsible neighbor as long as it sees the preservation of Dayton as necessary for regional stability and EU membership.”

I believe this statement, while giving Serbia undue credit, is essentially accurate in terms of the decision-making process in Belgrade as demonstrated last week. There are few true statesmen in the world – leaders who will do the right thing for the right reasons; the aim of conditionality is to make doing the right thing the least painful, or most attractive, option, focusing on the results rather than the motives. It can incentivize, negatively or positively, responsible policies.

The EU was founded as a peace-building and stabilizing community. Fundamental to its DNA is the insistence that those wishing to join the club must have good neighborly relations. This obligation should be a primary factor, along with achievement of the standard and appropriate checklist of EU requirements pursuant to the SAA and the Acquis, in determining whether Serbia is prepared for EU candidacy.

The Commission will make its determination late this fall as to whether Serbia is ready to become a candidate. The 27 member states will then have to decide whether they agree. One hopes this condition will have broader backing among EU members than ICTY conditionality has had. Belgrade should be forced to choose between continuing support – tacitly or openly – for increasingly irresponsible and dangerous policies in Banja Luka and its path to Brussels.

Kurt Bassuener is a Senior Associate of the Democratization Policy Council. He lives in Sarajevo.