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E.U. Finds Serbia Censure Lacking

01 April 2010 19:03 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. 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, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€ newspaper. 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 â€œgenocide.â€
Ms. Ashton and her colleague Stefan Fule, who is responsible for enlargement of the European Union, welcomed the apology as an â€œimportant stepâ€ but reminded Serbia of its obligations to capture war criminals. The Dutch government, whose United Nations peacekeepers proved powerless to defend Srebrenica against General Mladicâ€™s forces in July 1995, is pressing the bloc hard for his arrest.
The Serbian Parliamentâ€™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 â€œSerbian heroâ€ 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 â€œa process which is difficult but essential for Serbian society to go through.â€ They stressed that Serbiaâ€™s pledge to cooperate fully with the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague was â€œcrucialâ€ 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 Serbiaâ€™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 Serbiaâ€™s E.U. membership.
The Srebrenica massacre is an emotional issue in the Netherlands, in part because of the Dutch peacekeepersâ€™ 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 â€” passed in Belgrade by a narrow majority of 127 votes in the 250-seat legislature â€” 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 Serbiaâ€™s international standing for decades.
â€œSome see it as an important moment of historic reckoning,â€ said Ivan Milosevic, a leading political analyst. â€œBut many others think itâ€™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.â€
Indeed, the declaration met strong opposition from nationalists, who called it shameful and unjust, insisting that genocide had not taken place.
â€œWhy do you want to put a mark on the future generations that they will never wash away?â€ asked Velimir Ilic, a conservative opposition parliamentarian quoted by The Associated Press.
Natasa Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law fund in Belgrade, said it was notable that the Socialist Party of Serbia, the former party of the wartime leader Slobodan Milosevic, had voted in favor of the resolution, even as she emphasized that the atmosphere during the debate in the Serbian parliament was â€œugly.â€ She lamented that the word â€œgenocideâ€ was â€œnot clearly used.â€
Western diplomats have insisted that public perceptions of war crimes in Serbia are critical to the countryâ€™s drive for international rehabilitation.
Sonja Licht, a leading human rights activist in Serbia, said the vote was an important moment of healing in a country that had long suffered from historical amnesia.
â€œThis is an important moment for Serbia and for the region,â€ she said. â€œIt is the accepting of responsibility for a major crime on behalf of the Serbian people in a region where confronting the past has not been easy.â€
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fragile multiethnic nation divided into a Muslim-Croat Federation and a Serb Republic, the vote was equally polarizing. While some in the countryâ€™s Muslim community cautiously welcomed it as an important step toward reconciliation, victimsâ€™ groups called it an insult for omitting the word genocide.
â€œWe canâ€™t get this kind of statement in our own state Parliament because of resistance from Bosnian Serbs,â€ said Sead Numanovic, editor in chief of Avaz, Bosniaâ€™s largest-circulation newspaper, which has close ties to the Bosniak Muslim community. â€œThe vote is a modest step in Serbia confronting the truth, but there is no overall mood in Serbia to face up to the wrongdoings of the past.â€
Recent polls show that a majority of Serbs either do not know about war crimes in Bosnia, or did not believe they had taken place.
Serbians were graphically confronted with the facts of Srebrenica for the first time in June 2005, when television broadcast a video of the killing of six Muslim men by members of a Serbian paramilitary unit. Still, resistance to Serbiaâ€™s accepting responsibility has remained.