Better late than never

Goran  Hadžić, the last remaining Serb fugitive from indictments by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, was arrested today and will be transferred to The Hague for trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Hadžić was president of the so-called “Serbian Autonomous District /Sprska autonomna oblast/ Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srem” and later of the Republic of Serbian Krajina /Republika Srpska krajina, the Serb parastate created in the early 1990s inside Croatia.  He is accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise to persecute and murder Croats and other non-Serbs as well as imprisoning and torturing them in inhumane and cruel ways.  He is also accused of deporting and forcibly transferring non-Serbs as well as the wanton destruction of their property. 

With this arrest, Belgrade fulfills one of the important conditions for it to achieve candidacy status for European Union membership, thus relieving the Dutch of their promise of a veto unless cooperation with the Hague Tribunal was complete.  It also opens the door to a thorough reform of Serbia’s own security services, which have clearly been implicated in helping Hadžić and Ratko Mladić to hide for many years. I hope the investigation will extend to the Serbian Orthodox Church as well, which the Serbian war crimes prosecutor alleges was implicated in hiding Hadžić.

Is this the end of the conditions Serbia will have to meet?  No.  There will be many more as it makes its way through the many “chapters” of the acquis communitaire, the laws and regulations of the EU.  Important among the conditions will be “good neighborly relations” with both Kosovo and Bosnia, which do not exist today even if there has been some improvement on both fronts.  Further Belgrade/Pristina talks have however been put off until September, suggesting that there are problems in coming to closure on the few, rather elementary items that are said to have been agreed already.

Belgrade, Zagreb, Brussels and Washington all have good reasons to be happy with this arrest, which closes the book on the Serbian indictees even if there are long trials still ahead.  Better late than never.