Timothy William Waters, who formerly worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, had a timely opinion piece in the New York Times last week. (Also, here.) It had the thought-provoking title, Why insist on the surrender of Ratko Mladic?
This, at a time when (1) everyone seems to agree that Mladic, the principal military author of the massacre of Srebenica, is hiding out inside Serbia somewhere, (2) the European Union continues to insist that if Serbia wants to win admission to the EU any time soon, then it needs to hand Mladic over to ICTY immediately, and (3) the people of Montenegro are going to the polls this weekend, to vote on whether they want to secede from the federation they currently have with Serbia, or not. (Personally, I'm not sure how relevant this latter situation is to the Mladic case. The Guardian's Simon Tisdall seems to think it is.)
Waters, in his article, takes on three arguments he sees being made by those in Europe and elsewhere who have sought to establish a tight linkage/conditionality between Serbia's handover of Mladic and progress towards its integration into the EU:
Linkage might compel General Mladic's arrest and jump-start normal politics in Serbia, but it also risks backlash and delay; in fact, talks have now been suspended. How important is General Mladic's arrest balanced against the integration of 8 million people in a region that badly needs stability? Against the decisions that must be made regarding independence and constitutional reform in Montenegro, Kosovo and Bosnia, in which Serbia's role is critical? It is possible that insisting on "Mladic or bust" will make bust more likely.
The second assumption: General Mladic's arrest is necessary to prove that Serbia is serious about transforming itself. But is extracting General Mladic under pressure going to change Serbian values?
Rather than linking talks to one arrest, the European Union should ask if a deeply brutalized society like Serbia's is a worthy partner for integration, regardless of the disposition of any one war criminal. Making General Mladic a totem for what Europe really needs — Serbia's transformation — stunts the union's ability to understand and encourage that process.
... Then there are the advantages to not insisting. Negotiated reforms could begin in earnest, and integration might make the Serbs eventually turn their backs on General Mladic and what he represents. How much better for reconciliation if the Serbs spit out General Mladic on their own, in shame and disgust, not because they see his surrender to The Hague as the only way to get their hands on 30 euros of silver.
A third assumption underlies the other two: that Europe's demands are natural and uncontroversial and only recalcitrant Serbian nationalists don't get it.
But denying the discretionary nature of these demands stifles debate about real costs. Europe claims that it is Serbia that is choosing isolation and stagnation, but these costs are determined by Europe. For reasons most Europeans do not agree with, General Mladic's arrest is controversial in a Serbia otherwise eager to integrate. Is one war criminal's arrest really worth pushing Serbia back into the dark? There's no easy formula for deciding where to draw the line, but the calculation is not helped by soporifically pious pronouncements about the necessity of linking a nation's fate to one man's, nor by pretending that Europe is not imposing the terms, however just.
[Actually, I don't think anyone is pretending that these days. The high politics behind the operation of ICTY seems quite transparent to me. ~HC]
Serbia's integration into Europe is vital, and that is precisely why Europe needs a rational debate about what it should and should not ask of Serbia. The effect of the present policy is uncertain: Serbia's normalization might be set back by General Mladic's arrest or, as has now happened, by a too hasty insistence on it by outsiders. Precisely because Serbia's integration is vital, both to Serbia and to Europe, Europe should consider if it really must be delayed.
Yes, of course I know Serbia is not Germany. But I don't think that it's relatively smaller size somehow makes it "okay" to maintain a regime of collective punishment on all the Serbian people...
(I note, too, that the Allies' post-1918 decisions regarding the measures of collective punishment against Germany were also associated with a demand that Germany "hand over" an accused high-level war criminal to the Allies for punishment: in that case, it was Kaiser Wilhelm. He, however, escaped Germany and lived out his days in Netherlands-- not too far from The Hague.)
At the end of his op-ed, Waters comes to what I tend to think is the emotional crux of the European desire to have Mladic handed over to ICTY:
Because we want a war criminal, badly. And it doesn't matter what it might cost.
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