EU member states threaten to delay pact with Serbia

Barring a last-minute surprise, the EU’s pre-accession pact with Serbia is unlikely to be signed during this month’s meeting of EU foreign ministers, diplomats in Brussels say.

A majority of EU governments are willing to relax the main condition for the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) to be signed, full co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In their view, this would boost Boris Tadic, the pro-Western incumbent candidate in the presidential election set for 20 January, and help reconcile Serbia with the loss of its province Kosovo, which is expected to declare independence after the Serbian elections.

"This presidential election is not going to be an ordinary presidential election, it is more like a referendum" on the country’s future, Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic told European Voice on Tuesday (8 January). "There’s going to be a European and an anti-European vision of Serbia on offer."

Jeremic, a member of Tadic’s Democratic Party, said that he had put a simple question before his EU counterparts: "Do you support the European future of Serbia? If you do, then help us at the hour of need."

EU foreign ministers are to meet on 28 January, just days before an all-but-certain presidential run-off on 3 February.

Tadic is running neck-and-neck with Tomislav Nikolic, the deputy leader of the Radical Party. Vojislav Šešelj, founder and leader of the Radical Party, is currently on trial for war crimes at the ICTY.

"We are fully co-operating with The Hague," Jeremic said. "This condition has been met already."

But not all EU member states see things that way and signing the SAA requires unanimity among the EU’s 27 members.

Belgium and the Netherlands maintain that full co-operation means the arrest and transfer of Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic, the most prominent of the four men - all of them Serbs - still wanted by the tribunal.

A senior EU diplomat said that protecting this conditionality was important for the integrity of the enlargement process as a whole.

Many governments, including the UK, are sympathetic to that view but appear willing to reconsider conditionality in order to influence the Serbian election and to make Serbia more pliable over Kosovo.

"This is wishful thinking," said Dušan Reljic, an expert on south-east Europe at Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, a German think-tank, adding that it was "naive" to believe that Serbian voters would be swayed by the signing of the SAA.

Serbia’s Prime Minister, Vojislav Koštunica, warned the EU on 3 January that it had to choose between signing the SAA with Belgrade and sending a police and judicial mission to Kosovo.

It was generally assumed that the decision to launch such a mission, which had received the political go-ahead from EU leaders at the December summit, would also be taken at the 28 January meeting. This now appears unlikely as the mission’s legal basis, in the absence of a United Nations Security Council resolution, still needs to be worked out.

Barring a last-minute surprise, the EU’s pre-accession pact with Serbia is unlikely to be signed during this month’s meeting of EU foreign ministers, diplomats in Brussels say.