EU diplomats: Serbia to be rewarded for Hague tribunal cooperation

Jun 11, 2010, 15:30 GMT

Brussels - Serbia is expected to be allowed to take another step towards European Union membership next week despite having failed to catch war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, diplomats said Friday.

Serbia's advance towards the EU is conditioned to 'full cooperation' with the United Nations' court for former Yugoslavia in the Hague (ICTY), which is seeking to try Mladic on genocide charges.

An EU diplomat said that ICTY's chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, is likely to tell EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday, that he is 'pretty happy' with what Serbia is doing to hunt down Mladic and another remaining war crime suspect, Goran Hadzic.

Despite failing to catch the fugitives, in the past months Serbia has stepped up its actions, handing over Mladic's war time diaries to prosecutors in the Hague and arresting the former general's wife on charges of holding weapons illegally.

That should be enough for EU countries to start ratifying the Association and Stabilisation Agreement (ASA), the source added.

He was referring to a pre-accession deal with Serbia that was signed in 2008 but has been kept on ice since, due to some countries' insistence that Serbia first honours its commitments to ICTY.

The Netherlands, whose UN-mandated soldiers were guarding the Bosnian town of Srebrenica before being driven out by Mladic Bosnian Serb army, which then proceeded to execute 8,000 men and children, have been particularly strict on the issue.

The Srebrenica massacre, taking place in July 1995 at the end of a three-year civil war, was the bloodiest incident in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

A spokesman for the Dutch mission to the EU told the German Press Agency, dpa, said that 'if (Brammertz') report is positive ... we will be ready to begin the ratification process for the ASA.

Serbia, which took a major step towards 'full cooperation' with the ICTY in 2008 with the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, another suspect charged with genocide in connection to Srebrenica, was already rewarded last December, when the free-trade component of the ASA was unblocked by the EU, following a positive report from Brammertz.

But Dutch officials stressed the decision foreseen Monday does not mean Serbia is off the hook, pointing out that the process for EU membership still requires further steps that give the bloc's member states several opportunities to exercise their veto powers.

Serbia submitted a formal EU application in December, and is waiting for the bloc's governments to pass it on to the European Commission for technical assessment.

Diplomats said the expected positive news from Brammertz would not be enough to trigger that move, indicating that Germany, Britain and the Netherlands wanted to take 'wider issues' into consideration.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), another Hague-based UN court, is expected in the coming months to give its opinion on the legality of Kosovo's independence from Serbia.

The EU's leading member states, which all supported Pristina's move, are expected to keenly follow Belgrade's reaction to the ruling.

An ambiguous verdict could give Serbia further ammunition to question Kosovo's independence, which could in turn reignite tensions in the Balkan region.