Re-Certifying Serbia’s Future 

Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic 

Monday’s State Department announcement that Serbia and Montenegro has been re-certified as “cooperating” with the Hague War Crimes Tribunal is the correct decision. It signals that the Bush Administration is re-orienting its Balkans policy, combining a continuing concern with the moral dimensions of international relations more seamlessly with concerns for international security and stability. The morality of results is trumping the morality of intentions. 

Secretary Powell has acted prudently by furthering the foreign policy goals of the Bush Administration as well as those of the previous one which, on this score, are identical: Serbia, the metropolitan power of the Balkans, is becoming the place of reconciliation between Clinton’s decade-old vision of a “new map of freedom" and the Bush Administration’s goal of establishing a "balance of power that favors freedom." Simply put, it is in the interest of the United States to prevent a slide back to the dark days of nationalism and conflict anywhere in the Balkans, and a strong, prosperous Serbia is the lynchpin of this security strategy. 

Powell determined that Serbia had met the criteria of Section 578 of the foreign Operations, Export Financing and Related Programs Act, Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Resolution, 2003, as well as the criteria related to the termination of restrictions imposed by Section 576 of the same Act.Serbia’s re-certification means that a significant potential barrier for the full normalization of close and cooperative ties between Washington and Belgrade has been removed. The announcement also means that the Bush Administration considers Serbia to be well on its way to becoming an integral part of the West—a message that the EU, IMF, World Bank and UN will hear loud and clear. 

The decision was correct for two reasons. First, on its own merits, Serbia has demonstrated that the country is well on its way to full cooperation with the Tribunal (as it is obligated to do by treaty and recently enacted legislation). From last Thursday’s arrest of the Montenegrin Veselin Sljivancanin—accused of ordering the massacre of 200 civilians near Vukovar in 1991—to the recent extradition of Jovica Stanisic, the former head of Milosevic’s secret police, the evidence of cooperation is palpable. 

The second reason concerns the emerging Belgrade-Washington relationship. Over the last few months, the Bush Administration has made it known to Belgrade that it seeks warmer relations based on shared security interests.  

If the Balkans are ever to move forward, stability and prosperity must be entrenched within the borders of its metropolitan power. Without a healthy Serbia becoming a solid regional leader helping to strengthen border security, enforce export controls,  cooperate in the war on terror and promote the rule of law and good governance, much of the region will turn its back on the future: the specter of Bosnia or Kosovo once again becoming a European beachhead for Al-Qaeda is of the highest concern, not just for Serbia but the entire civilized world as well. 

In early April, during his groundbreaking visit to Belgrade, Powell said that he was departing Serbia with “a very good feeling about [the government’s] sense of commitment and purpose.” The Powell visit was followed a little more than a month later by an announcement from the White House that authorized the resumption of arms sales and military assistance to Belgrade. President Bush said that closer bilateral military ties with Serbia and Montenegro “will strengthen the security of the United States.” Re-certification is the keystone in the new relationship. 

The importance of this new relationship for both sides should not be underestimated. The burgeoning America-Serbia friendship is allowing Belgrade to consolidate its democratic victory over the past and maintain its freedom. And in Serbia, America now has an example of a people to which it has helped deliver responsible liberty even without the presence of vital interests in the calculus of U.S. policymaking.  

There are some in the NGO community who are upset with Secretary Powell's decision and argue that Serbia's level of cooperation is still too low. They mistake the world that ought to be for the world that is. Undeniably, Serbia is a safer place now than it has been for a long time. Government officials do indeed retain links to the underworld, but largely with those who are busily legitimizing their business and political interests. To expect a Balkan nation to expose all the skeletons in its closet at once is to demand the application of a ridiculous standard: that Belgrade become Denmark or Austria in the course of only a few years.  

Such a standard is meant to disappoint, for it is clear that no one who amassed more than a couple of thousand dollars in the Balkans in the last decade did so through pure and virtuous means. Those deserving imprisonment are the ones who remain wedded to violence and illegality, not those belonging to the much broader category of acquirers of privilege through illegitimate means in illegitimate times.  

Further, the United States is right not to press Serbia too hard on apprehending every war criminal at the same time. With the most formidable military, intelligence and law enforcement resources the world has ever seen, the United States is unable to discover the whereabouts of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Serbia, lacking anything resembling America’s resources, deserves the benefit of the doubt when it says that it cannot find Mladic. Belgrade, after all, remains unable to find the man who orchestrated the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March of this year—something it is desperately trying to do. 

Re-certification is an integral part of Washington’s recognition that to give Serbia’s new birth of freedom a real opportunity to succeed, a change of tactics by Western powers is in order. The way to affect Serbia’s political culture is though rewards and benefits, not penalties and threats. Those who would use sticks rather than carrots mistake today’s Serbia for the Serbia of yesterday, mistake the Serbia yearning to join the core-institutions of the West such as the EU and NATO for the Serbia that fought a war against both. 

Failure to re-certify would have emboldened the underground support networks these fugitives rely on. Opponents of re-certification do not understand that lack of cooperation is not proven by the lack of an arrest or two, because in cases like this, arrest and apprehension is only the final and most visible stage of a process of cooperation.  

Not re-certifying Serbia would have made it nearly impossible for Belgrade to sign onto the Article 98 provision of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Treaty. Signing Article 98 will in turn encourage the military reforms that are required to fully remove from power precisely those who are protecting some of these fugitives from justice, such as Ratko Mladic (the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army during the civil war in Bosnia) by securing bilateral military aid and assistance. Failure to sign will also make it almost impossible for Serbia to join the institutions of West such as NATO and the EU.  

Re-certification will give strength to those in Belgrade who reject the violence and destruction of the past. As Secretary Powell said in Belgrade, “there is no limit to the areas of cooperation that are ahead of us now that the government has committed itself so firmly […] to make this a better society.” 

Success in Serbia—a recent enemy in war, an emerging partner in peace—is important for the United States. It reminds the world that America is magnanimous in victory and signals to Europe that there is real substance to President Bush’s impressive rhetoric of freedom. And so with one eye on Serbia’s future and the other on the Middle East and beyond, the following lesson rises to the mind: To downplay the particularities of history is to precipitate its repetition.

Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic is the assistant managing editor of The National Interest.