Posted on 11/28/2009 3:10:40 PM PST by Ravnagora
The perplexity of Serbia's leaders is understandable.
Nearly nine years after they hustled Slobodan Milosevic off to the Hague to face war crimes charges and the end of his life in a jail cell -- a middle-of-the-night act with questionable legal authority that met with much applause from the West -- Serbia's "democratic reformers" remain smeared with the tar of Washington's former policy delusions.
They get no respect, even after holding democratic elections, remaking their economy on a Western model with more vehemence than most of the rest of the Balkans combined and slavishly doing almost all that the West has asked of them.
That disconnect in turn imperils the democratic experiment and makes regional stability all the harder to achieve, Serbia's president said in an interview last week.
"If I'm going to put something on the table -- on Serbia's political table -- without a consensus, that is not going to be our contribution to consensus, that is going to be our contribution to the instability of the future," President Boris Tadic said in Cleveland last week before traveling to New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly.
"That's why we need a very careful and very patient policy from the United States."
What he's getting instead is a U.S. cold shoulder on Serbs' biggest issue -- the unilateral partition of Serbia last year, spearheaded by the United States, to grant unilateral independence to Kosovo.
Possibly even more troubling, many of the same U.S. policy-makers who mangled policy in the Balkans when Bill Clinton was president now are busily applying to Afghanistan and Pakistan some of the same "tenets" of armed nation-building and nanny statedom as dictated from Foggy Bottom.
And while the challenges and security implications of the Balkans in the 1990s and Central Asia in the 2000s are more dissimilar than alike, it's troubling to realize how much of Washington still prefers delusion to reality -- especially when it can be spun into black-and-white, good-versus-bad terms.
That's why it's best to treat skeptically some of the simplistic remedies now being offered for Afghanistan -- one of the most complex countries in the world and one where the United States has deep national security interests in preventing a new chasm of lawlessness from swallowing the next-door nuclear state of Pakistan.
That's also why Serbia's aggrieved leadership team deserves attention -- if only to parse out exactly how deluded policy becomes bad decision-making over time.
Objectively, Serbia has done most everything "right" since 2000, when voters in the most populous and geographically largest of the ex-Yugoslav republics ousted Milosevic. It's held a string of successful democratic elections largely untainted by fraud; made peace with its neighbors; apologized for Serb atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo; and prosecuted perpetrators (albeit with mixed results). It's busy building a shiny, new superhighway into the heart of the rest of Europe -- a physical statement about how the majority of Serbs see their future.
Unlike the old Serbia, which stoked the fires of war among fellow Serbs as the former Yugoslavia began to dissolve, this Serbia hasn't gone to war over Kosovo, but continues to advocate dialogue and diplomacy.
"Serbian democracy has reacted to the Kosovo declaration of independence in a way that nobody had ever reacted to anything of that sort in the history of the Balkans," said Vuk Jeremic, the Serbian foreign minister.
"This is the first time in the history of the Balkans that a thing like this happens and nobody goes to war with anybody," Jeremic added.
But because Serbia has been unable to capture two of the 46 people wanted by a U.N. tribunal in the Hague for war-crimes prosecutions -- the rest were handed over or turned themselves in -- the idea that it's stonewalling continues.
"The United States administration knows very well what we are doing in order to capture Ratko Mladic, because we have cooperation in that," said Serbian President Tadic. He said the lack of public acknowledgement of that cooperation continues to drive a misperception that Serbia is not doing its best to snare the Bosnian Serbs' wartime general, accused in the Bosnian war's worst atrocity, at Srebrenica, where more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys may have been slaughtered.
"Why would we avoid arresting Ratko Mladic when we already arrested Milosevic and [Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan] Karadzic?" Tadic asked.
"When you underestimate the nuances and the convoluted history of a complicated place like Bosnia, you pay a certain price," Jeremic said. "In our case, it was paying a regional price. If you go to Iraq and then do the same thing -- underestimate the history and the complexity of relations between Sunni, Shia and the Kurds -- then you end up paying a global price."
Sullivan is editor of The Plain Dealer's editorial pages.
*****
I planted a Serbian Spruce in my yard this year. I’ve done my part for World Peace. ;)
They aren’t muslim.
Euros prefer to betray their friends and snuggle up to their enemies. It’s more politically correct.
What? No Serbian Bellflower, too? You can do better than that! ;)
Well, I SELL a lot of them at my garden center. Does THAT count? LOL!
I’ve had no time in the past four years to even LOOK at my perennial beds, let alone add to them. If any of my regular customers actually SAW my gardens, they’d be appalled and wonder how I landed my job managing a garden center in the first place, LOL!
I can’t wait to quit my garden center job - so I can go BACK to being a GARDENER! :)
Don’t be sorry, it was doubly post worthy!
meant to say double
Hopefully that will change with the next administration.
God bless them.
That is because currently, in the US, we are stuck with the H.O.G.(Hussein Occupation Government)
Good enough for me.
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