OLLI Rehn, the European Union’s commissioner for enlargement, is a professorial-looking Finn with the cool wit and understated manner of his native land. So he could hardly be suspected of exaggerating when he spoke excitedly this week of a “new European dawn” for the western Balkans - not so very long ago the bloodiest and most troubled corner of the continent.
The reason for his enthusiasm was overshadowed by a big and controversial event: the formal launch of long-awaited EU membership talks with Turkey. But the near-simultaneous start of accession negotiations with Croatia, agreement on a key partnership deal with Serbia and a breakthrough on unfreezing divisions in Bosnia all added up to significant progress towards bringing the entire region into the European mainstream.
Terrible things spring to mind when foreigners think about the Balkans: burning villages, ethnic cleansing, the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica — the worst atrocity on European soil since the Nazi era.
Five years later, in 2000, came the liberating overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic, the man who set a disintegrating Yugoslavia alight in the name of Greater Serbia — and is now on trial for genocide at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
The region’s path to Europe has been slow and uneven. Slovenia, the smallest, wealthiest and most homogenous of the old Yugoslav republics, was lucky enough to stay out of the wider wars of the 1990s. It reaped its reward by being among the 10 countries that joined the EU in last year’s “big bang” enlargement, delighted to distance itself from its fractious Balkan neighbours and look to Italy, Austria — and Brussels — for its future prosperity.
Now neighbouring Croatia, having shed the stifling nationalist legacy of Franjo Tudjman, is back on track towards the same coveted destination. Its EU accession talks — which like those of all candidates cover everything from slaughterhouse standards, through financial services legislation to human rights — began in Luxembourg just hours after Turkey’s.
Britain, in the hot seat of the EU’s rotating presidency, was anxious to avoid a crisis. It was careful to wait until the row over Turkey — centring on Austria’s demand for Ankara to be granted a “special” status that fell short of full membership — was resolved to avoid the impression of a link between the two. Vienna’s view was that if one large and overwhelmingly Muslim country was being invited into the club, very much against its wishes, it had to be accompanied by a small, fellow-Catholic one that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
The Croatian talks had been on hold for the past few months because Zagreb had failed to cooperate with the Hague tribunal. But timely certification from Carla del Ponte, the court’s chief prosecutor, of a more positive attitude, meant the process could resume — even though the popular General Ante Gotovina, on the run since 2001 for the alleged mass murder of Serbs, remains at large. With an estimated accession date of 2009, there is time enough left to find a solution.
Some critics have complained about an unseemly connection between what should have been separate issues, even of a surrender to Austrian “blackmail” that bodes ill for justice for other war crimes suspects. But the larger lesson is that when Brussels beckons, even the most intractable barriers can start to shift. A similar effect has been at work in Serbia-Montenegro, the rump of the old Yugoslav federation. It was told this week that it could start negotiating a pre-membership “stabilisation and association agreement” (SAA) — a name, Chris Patten observes in his new memoirs of his commission years, “not invented by an advertising agency copywriter”. However clunky the terminology, the point of an SAA is to buttress a commitment to reform with the prospect of eventual EU membership. Progress on this way-station — which brings preferential market access, loans, and other aid — will be linked to the surrender of the Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic, after several other war crimes suspects were handed over to the court in recent months.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
