On Sunday (11 July), Boris Tadic, Serbia’s president, will attend a ceremony in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica marking the anniversary of the massacre in 1995 of more than 8,000 Muslim men by Bosnian Serb forces and Serbian paramilitaries. 

This will not be Tadic’s first time at the annual event; he attended five years ago, becoming the first Serbian official to do so. But this year, Tadic will go knowing that Serbia’s path toward membership of the EU is no longer blocked by its failure to apprehend Ratko Mladic, the commander of the troops who overran Srebrenica and then systematically killed all the men they had captured.

The prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz, told European Voice that “we have no reasons to believe that Mladic is not in Serbia” and that Serbia could do more to find him. Until recently, that would have been enough for the Netherlands, discreetly backed by Belgium and the UK, to prevent the ratification of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Serbia, the main pre-accession treaty offered by the EU.

But, at a meeting of EU foreign ministers on 14 June, the Dutch (as well as the Belgians and British) lifted the veto, citing the conclusions of a report submitted by Brammertz to the UN.

Ahead of the meeting, Maxime Verhagen, the Netherlands’ acting foreign minister, said that his country would ratify the SAA “if the prosecutor [Brammertz] reaffirms to the EU foreign ministers that Serbia is co-operating”. This was careful wording, avoiding the term “full co-operation” that EU foreign ministers used to describe the conditions for ratifying the SAA after they had signed it in April 2008. But the Dutch had blocked ratification of the SAA in December, after Brammertz’s last report, and that they lifted their veto now suggested that Serbia was being more co-operative.

Brammertz makes clear, though, that Serbia’s co-operation may be good overall, but it is not full and has not improved since December. “It is obvious that we are more critical in relation to the search for fugitives than in the previous report,” Brammertz said.

In his latest report, he outlined a series of recommendations that implicitly criticise Belgrade’s efforts to apprehend Mladic (as well as Goran Hadžic, the other fugitive still wanted by the ICTY).

Ratification uncertainty

Dutch parliamentarians are sceptical about their government’s decision, adopting a motion last week (29 June) demanding a full explanation. “We have always heard from our government that we need full co-operation, and as long as we do not hear that from Brammertz we do not want to ratify,” said Han ten Broeke, a liberal MP who is co-sponsor of the motion.

Dutch ratification therefore remains uncertain. So does the next step in Serbia’s membership bid, the formal opinion of the European Commission on its application, lodged in December. It is up to the member states to request that opinion, and Serbia has been lobbying hard for such a request. But several EU governments, above all the Dutch and the Germans, oppose the idea of moving so fast – not because of the war-crimes question but because they want to stick to the established sequence of the accession process.

Božidar Djelic, Serbia’s deputy prime minister, is confident that member states will ask the Commission in the autumn. “We do hope that in the autumn a consensus [among the member states] can be reached, possibly in September,” he said. “One would be well advised to buttress Serbia’s European path.”

With the SAA unfrozen and with rapid movement now a possibility, have the prospects of the 68-year-old Mladic dying a free man in Serbia increased? Brammertz does not answer such questions directly, but he is clear about the importance of the EU’s leverage.

“The conditionality by the international community has been instrumental in the past in achieving co-operation,” he said. “This support is still very much needed to arrest the fugitives.”

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