The Low Countries Take the High Road

By:  Eric A. Witte and Kurt Bassuener

This article was originally published by The Wall Street Journal and is republished her with the permission of its author Eric A. Witte.  Mr. Witte and Mr. Bassuener are the senior associates of the Democratization Policy Council - "a global initiative for accountability in democracy promotion."

Whether Ratko Mladic, who had operational command of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, ever faces justice depends on the Dutch government maintaining a lonely moral leadership within the European Union. The pace of Serbia's democratic reform also hangs in the balance.

It was the Netherlands, backed only by Belgium, that insisted earlier this month that Serbia's further progress toward EU membership be conditioned on full cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The dispute is sure to resume when EU foreign ministers convene again today.

Many EU officials and governments deem the July arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic as a sign of Serbia's full cooperation with the ICTY. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn argue that ratification of Serbia's Stabilization and Association Agreement should proceed, and that an interim agreement bringing many of its benefits to Serbia should be implemented immediately. This position has the backing of 25 member states, which today will try to force the Dutch in particular to assent to the unanimous approval needed for the interim agreement. They hope that rewards now for the Karadzic arrest will bring reform later. If the Dutch hold firm to their stated conditions, Serbia will be disappointed.

For the Netherlands and Belgium, Serb atrocities such as Srebrenica, the largest single mass killing in Europe since World War II, demand complete justice. The two countries have blocked these agreements until the last fugitives are arrested.

This is not the first time that Messrs. Solana and Rehn have sought to abandon conditions on Serbia's EU accession. Even before the Karadzic arrest, they sought pretexts to accelerate Serbia's integration despite its failure to arrest fugitives or provide ICTY investigators with full access to documents and witnesses. Most EU member states supported this approach as a means of encouraging Serbian reforms. Without Dutch and Belgian insistence, the arrest of Karadzic -- hailed by ICTY Prosecutor Serge Brammertz as a "milestone" -- would not have been achieved.

When applied, conditionality requires Serbia to prove its willingness to enter Europe's community of common values. It also has afforded Serbia's democrats an opportunity to outflank nationalist opponents. Quietly, Serbian officials admit this. But politicians everywhere avoid heavy lifting when given the chance. The EU has repeatedly granted this chance, retarding Serbia's democratic development and demonstrating that their definition of conditionality is itself conditional.

Serbian reformers now in power continue to argue against EU conditionality. But President Boris Tadic and Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic reaped substantial political benefits from the Karadzic arrest. The aftermath of the arrest revealed the ultranationalist Radical Party's inability to create significant protests. The Socialist Party, drawn into coalition with Mr. Tadic's Democrats, is accused of "treason" by the Radical Party and its other erstwhile nationalist allies and wants to avoid new elections. This makes Serbia's current coalition its most stable in the post-Milosevic era.

Belgrade can finish the job by arresting Mladic and Croatian Serb separatist leader Goran Hadzic. Mladic's whereabouts have been less mysterious than Karadzic's were, but in some ways his is a harder case. He enjoys greater loyalty among nationalists and elements of the military and intelligence services, who help to protect him and could lash out following an arrest. But this, too, provides the Tadic government with an opportunity to root out elements that have long proved lethal to reform. Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic's assassination in 2003 demonstrated the cost of delaying a purge that should have begun after Milosevic's ouster in 2000.

The security-criminal nexus burdens Serbia with organized crime and corruption that make later fulfillment of EU-required technical reforms more difficult in any case. Now is the best -- and perhaps only -- time to confront it, while radical elements in Serbian society are in disarray and demoralized by the arrest of Karadzic, and soon after the electorate has demonstrated its preference for pro-European policies. Waiting to tackle the hardest reforms will only give the hard-liners time to regroup. Dutch resolve on EU conditionality has given Mr. Tadic another chance to clean house and to justify arrests to an electorate that expects him to take bold steps to meet European standards.

ICTY Prosecutor Brammertz, who visited Belgrade on Wednesday, will deliver a new assessment of Serbia's cooperation to the U.N. Security Council in December. He is standing firm, telling journalists, "The arrest of Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic is still the key condition for Serbia's full cooperation with The Hague Tribunal." Last week, Javier Solana publicly pressured the prosecutor to deem Serbia cooperative even without the fugitives' arrests: "I hope very much that he will bring good news...If that is the case, we will be able to begin implementation." Dutch moral leadership can continue to buffer the ICTY prosecutor from such overt and short-sighted political interference.

Belgrade can be confident of a positive evaluation if Mladic and Hadzic are arrested and if it provides full access to documents and witnesses. Only then will Serbia have demonstrated that it refuses to harbor war criminals, has established full civilian control over its security services, and is firmly set on the path of reform. The next step on that path still leads through The Hague.