Del ponte flies in

As Europe went about its business – the usual boring chemicals directive, postal services and constitutional verification stuff – an avenging angel slipped into Brussels.
International Criminal court prosecutor Carla del Ponte is trying to make up for one of the most obscene episodes in modern EU members’ history: the failure to act decisively during the Yugoslav war, until the Americans came in, the culmination of which barbarism was the massacre of Srebrenica in July 1995.
Although the enclave was guarded by Dutch soldiers under a UN mandate, the UN’s uselessness neither exonerates the Dutch commanders on the ground for ejecting the Bosnian men who had sheltered in the UN base to their certain deaths from the vicious Serb army outside, nor the EU in its passivity in the war leading up to the climactic outcome of the first genocide on European soil since 1945.
Del Ponte, the Swiss prosecutor who once dealt with Russian and Italian mafia, came to talk to journalists to mark her eight years as the chief prosecutor for the International Criminals Tribunal in the Hague, dealing with war crimes carried out in the former Yugoslavia. The multilingual lawyer her opponents have called everything from “La Puttana” to “the unguided missile” is as impressive and attractive a sixty-year-old woman as I have ever seen, and her zeal at bringing the big fish who have still eluded her to justice is undiminished.
She was accompanied by the commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, who is crucial in determining whether Serbia gets to join the EU or not, and it was not quite clear whether they were singing from the same hymn sheet, playing a bad-cop cop good-cop routine, or whether Rehn’s relative emollience towards Serbia evident at the meeting suggests the EU is actually contemplating letting Serbia getting away with some of the trappings of membership without handing over the butcher of Srebrenica, general Ratko Mladic, and his boss, Bosnian Serb republic ex-President Radovan Karadzic.
Last year Rehn suspended membership talks for Serbia for the antechamber of the EU, the Stabilization and Association agreement, on Del Ponte’s recommendation because of stalling in handing over particularly Mladic, who is still believed to be in Serbia. (Karadzic’s whereabouts are less well known). Earlier in June however he announced that talks would start again, though Del Ponte was adamant that the association agreement – which Croatia, Macedonia and Albania have already signed, Croatia even an EU candidate – should not be completed until Serbia had done its bit. Croatia’s chief war criminal Ante Gotovina was arrested in a hotel in Tenerife after a cock up involving his wife’s careless use of her mobile phone. It was in December 2005, by coincidence two months after Croatia, having already signed the ASA, began its serious EU entry negotiations. Gotovina was accused of being accomplice to 150 deaths during operation storm in 1995, which drove thousands of Serbs out of Croatia; regarded as a war hero by many Croats, his arrest was unpopular. The Kosovo Albanian chief war criminal suspect Ramush Haradinaj has also been sent to the Hague and – in a recent coup – two of the five remaining chief suspects on the Serb side, just in this last month.
Del Ponteis right that it’s essential not to let up now and let the two biggest war criminals slip away before negotiation with Serbia pass their first stage. Croatia did sign the ASA before Gotovina was apprehended, but Gotovina’s crimes are not in the same league as Mladic’s Srebrenica.
Ever since Luxembourg’s foreign minister Jacque Poos announced in 1991 that Europe’s hour (as a foreign actor) has come and nothing happened, the EU’s record in the Balkans has been inglorious. There are some Serbs and their western sympathisers such as the academic John Laughland that raise a number of arguments against being too harsh on Serbia: at least accord it the ASA status granted to Croatia in anticipation of a handover of Mladic who until at least 2002 was actively protected by the nationalist prime minister Kostunica. That would be deeply wrong.
The EU has never let in countries which have had a recent war and then not atoned for it. (As Germany did). Many in Serbia (and Croatia) are caught in nationalist mindsets and find the war justified. It is dangerous to let wolves into the sheep’s lair; and the EU must set out a marker by insisting by giving no ground to what on balance is the worse side, and its war criminal heroes.
The EU failed to stop the war, but it mustn’t let one inglory be followed by another by being soft on the Serbs – again. Del Ponte understands that, it’s not clear whether Rehn and his coterie of EU officials in DG enlargement do.