Always Feeling A-serb-ic
Every nationality, no matter the nation, seems to recall their victimhood more vividly than their own crimes. Serbia is no exception, where Serbs are more apt to recall their massacring at the hands of the Croatian Ustase in the 1940s than the massacres Serbs perpetrated at the expense of Bosniaks in the early 1990s. So it was a healthy sign earlier this week when Serbian forces arrested Goran Hadzic, a war criminal on the run for the last seven years.
Portrait of a War Criminal's Booty.
(An intriguing side-note is that Hadzic slipped up, reportedly, because he had run out of money after years on the run and was attempting to sell Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait of a Man. It is now looking like the painting may have been a fake. Strangely, the painting emerged out of the abyss in 2007 in Belgrade and was reported to be owned by an unnamed Serbian collector, only to be resold later on by Christie’s. There’s still a lot of details to be worked out regarding the painting, but the lesson holds–selling art is indeed a hazardous business, and it is easy to lose a whole lot in the process!)
The arrest comes only two months after the arrest of Ratko Mladic, another Serbian war criminal, and about three years after the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, thus tying most of the ignominious military leaders from the genocides of the 90s into a little bow for the Hague. The arrest is seen as closing what Serbian President Boris Tadic called a ‘most difficult chapter’ in reckoning with both the past and with other European countries. The motives for capturing Hadzic, Karadzic, and Mladic may have been to hasten the arrival of EU accession talks, or they may have been motives of justice, or somewhere in between. To me, motives don’t much matter, as long as one is doing what is right and just.
Boris to the EU: "We Got All Three!"
As RFE/RL reported yesterday, “Serbians can finally begin to think seriously about setting down the road to integration into the European Union.” The New York Times echoed the sentiment, mentioning that,
Prosecutors had complained for years that Serbia was either blocking the movement of war crimes cases or handing over suspects in fits and starts, depending on who was in power.
Their criticism has delayed Serbia’s attempts to join the European Union, which had made cooperation with the tribunal a condition for membership talks. Although most of the 27 countries in the union had softened their stance in recent years, the Dutch government, which hosts the tribunal, was a holdout.
Within hours of the arrest, European Union leaders issued a statement praising the Serbian government. A decision on whether to open membership talks is scheduled for October.
The arrests are a vital step moving forward, but Serbia still has a long way to go before they’ve proved themselves beyond the acrimony of the 1990s. What’s more important are how Serbia approaches relations with the neighboring countries like Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia. These countries that spent decades butchering each other as part of an integrated Yugoslavia need to learn how to play nice, and, perhaps more importantly, deepen their economic ties to make future violence a far less attractive option.
As the RFE/RL article points out, Serbia still does not recognize the sovereignty of Kosovo, and abnegators include the relatively liberal President Tadic (to be fair, he likely would not have been elected President espousing a view respectful of Kosovar sovereignty.) Massacres have occurred as recently in 1999 in Kosovo, and a stalemate between Pristina and Belgrade only perpetuates the threat of further violence.
Good Food and Weather; Can't You Just Get Along?
While the Kosovo dispute festers (and has not much improved since Kosovo’s 2008 declaration of independence), Serbia continues to have fractious, far-from-amicable relations with its westerly neighbor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. While Bosnia accounts for 11% of Serbia’s exports, relations have worsened in recent years as the two young nations step on each other’s toes and exchange harsh words, although Serbia has expressed some optimism about their relations.
What is most important is deepening economic ties. Greater trade and more preferential terms between Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia would increase economic benefits of peace and thereby reduce the threat of violence. While President Tadic appears to be rather liberal, as a former psychologist and dramatist, he may have shown a flare of opportunism in him in his efforts to appeal to the EU. Opportunism, however, when turned domestically, can have dangerous implications and can lead to appeals for violence and ethnic divisions when times are tough–Slobodan Milosevic, for example, was one of the craftiest opportunists in memory in the Balkans, and it didn’t take long before his appeals turned violent. Great integration, however, makes violence a losing proposition, as violence would be more likely to be accompanied by reduced trade, less opportunities for employment, and fewer dinars coming in.
Moreover, improved relations from economic deals with contentious neighbors would make backsliding less likely. As it is now, Serbia can play nice until they accede to the EU, and then go back to disparaging their neighbors, returning to the precarious edge of violence. EU leaders should take note before giving Boris Tadic too many backslaps for catching criminals that were all too conspicuous to begin with. It wouldn’t hurt to give Serbia better guidelines for getting along with their neighbors and tell them to follow instructions:
Tags: amedeo modigliani, belgrade, boris tadic, bosnia and herzegovina, christie's, follow instructions, goran hadzic, kosovo, m.o.p., portrait of a man, radovan karadzic, ratko mladic, serbia, slobodan milosevic, the hague
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