E.U. Finds Serbia Censure Lacking

The European Union, which has been coaxing Serbia into a historical reckoning about its bloody role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, gave a cautious welcome Wednesday to a declaration by the Serbian Parliament that condemned the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica. But it warned that what amounted to reluctant, latter-day contrition about the worst massacre in Europe since World War II was insufficient if Serbia wanted closer ties with the bloc.
For that, the E.U. foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, indicated, Serbia must hand over Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander indicted more than 15 years ago on war crimes charges but still on the run.
After 13 hours of heated debate, the Serbian Parliament late Tuesday passed a resolution that apologized for Srebrenica and acknowledged that more could have been done to prevent the tragedy, but fell short of calling the killings a “genocide.”
Ms. Ashton and her colleague Stefan Fule, who is responsible for enlargement of the European Union, welcomed the apology as an “important step” but reminded Serbia of its obligations to capture war criminals. The Dutch government, whose United Nations peacekeepers proved powerless to defend Srebrenica against General Mladic’s forces in July 1995, is pressing the bloc hard for his arrest.
The Serbian Parliament’s declaration on Srebrenica calls for the arrest of Mr. Mladic and urges the authorities to intensify their efforts to find him. But in a sign of the obstacles ahead, some nationalist deputies in Belgrade lauded Mr. Mladic as a “Serbian hero” during the debate on the resolution. The Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted in 1995 on genocide charges in connection with Srebrenica, is being prosecuted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
In their statement, Ms. Ashton and Mr. Fule described the vote in Serbia as part of “a process which is difficult but essential for Serbian society to go through.” They stressed that Serbia’s pledge to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague was “crucial” for completing an agreement that is a steppingstone to talks on Serbian membership in the European Union.
The Dutch government, which in the past has blocked Serbia’s efforts to draw closer to the bloc, welcomed the Serbian declaration as a positive step. But it fell short of indicating that it would agree to ratify the so-called Stabilization and Association Agreement with Serbia, which should open the way to talks on Serbia’s E.U. membership.
The Srebrenica massacre is an emotional issue in the Netherlands, in part because of the Dutch peacekeepers’ role and because The Hague is host to the International Criminal Tribunal, which was set up to try the war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia.
The parliamentary declaration — passed in Belgrade by a narrow majority of 127 votes in the 250-seat legislature — deeply polarized Serbia, illustrating the extent to which the poor Balkan country was still struggling to come to terms with the past.
Analysts said the vote had divided the country between liberals who saw it as a seminal moment in which Serbia was finally confronting its historic demons and nationalists who saw it as a capitulation to the West that would tarnish Serbia’s international standing for decades.
“Some see it as an important moment of historic reckoning,” said Ivan Milosevic, a leading political analyst. “But many others think it’s a disgrace that Serbia is accepting collective guilt, and sacrificing our place in history by accepting what some see as a responsibility akin to the blame the Germans have accepted about the Holocaust.”
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