Tag: European Union
The unlikely parade
According to Serbia’s constitution, all citizens have the right to a peaceful demonstration. Homosexuals appear to be exempt from the rule. Even though LGBT activists announced several months in advance their plan to stage the Gay Pride events, including the parade, September 30-October 7. Serbian prime and interior minister Ivica Dačić recently stressed that the demonstration could be banned if the police assess the security risks as too high. Dačić added that he basically supports human rights of all people, including homosexuals, but is not going to risk the lives and safety of his policemen and potential participants of the parade.
Last year the Pride Parade was banned at the eleventh hour. The official explanation was that far right extremists were planning terrorist actions. No further information has been released since, nor has anyone been arrested in connection with these allegations. Organizers now fear the government will use the security risks as an excuse to ban Pride once again.
The issue is weightier than a few demonstrators in Belgrade. Now a candidate for EU membership, Serbia is hoping to get a date to start accession talks, which brings with it substantial financing. U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Phillip Reeker was among the first foreign diplomats to state public support to the Pride organizers. Several EU officials – including Jelko Kacin, the European parliament rapporteur for Serbia – have confirmed their attendance. While this year’s Gay Pride may not be crucial for Serbia’s further progress toward EU membership – at least not to the extent that improvement in relations with Kosovo is – the Europeans will certainly take it into account when deliberating on whether the country merits the date.
The first attempt by LGBT organizations to hold the parade was in 2001. The event ended in chaos, with participants brutally battered by football hooligans and militant ultranationalists. The organizers accused the police of deliberately failing to protect them. Scenes from television reports suggest they may well have been right.
Frightened of violence, LGBT activists were not even thinking of organizing the parade again until 2009, but the government eventually decided to disallow it. The decision has been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court only recently, which gives the LGBT community some hope that this year the tide might be turned.
In 2010, hundreds of Serbian lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transexuals were finally allowed to occupy a strictly enclosed area of the capital for about an hour, completely surrounded by cordons of police. Whether the demonstration was a success is debatable however. While the participants suffered no attack during the rally thanks to the immense security presence, the rest of the town saw a series of clashes between hooligans and riot police, who were ordered to show as much restraint toward rioters as possible. Belgrade was trashed. Of about 200 injured, a large majority were policemen. The government was believed to have allowed the demonstration only to improve its chances of getting EU candidate status.
Serbia is a conservative society and people generally oppose the gay parade. Although most of them disapprove violence against the LGBT population, they also believe that homosexuals should not express their sexual identity in public places. Homophobia is mainly present among younger generations. Teenagers are the most violent members of extreme nationalist and football hooligan groups.
In addition to the issue of human rights in general and gay rights in particular, the government’s hesitancy raises the question of Serbia’s institutional capability to guarantee its citizens an elementary level of safety. There is a widespread belief that the militant far right groups consist entirely of “kids” from the margins of society who use violence merely as a way to express frustration. While that may be true for some of the low-level operatives, the bulk of their leaders – especially of football hooligan groups – are well situated individuals with criminal records that involve serious offenses such as armed robberies, drug trade, extortion, murder attempts and so on.
Despite their criminal activities, most of these extremists have rarely, if ever, been brought to justice. The support they enjoy from the Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC), which is the most popular and influential institution in the country, helps them gain legitimacy among ordinary people and portray themselves as the “ultimate guardians of the Serb Orthodoxy and heroic tradition.” Outgoing Russian ambassador Aleksandr Konuzin – who is almost as popular here as SPC – was photographed with members of far right groups on several occasions, including his visit to the Serbs from northern Kosovo.
Militant ultranationalists were most privileged during the prime ministry of former conservative nationalist prime minister Vojislav Koštunica of the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), which ended in 2008 after an attack on the U.S. embassy building in Belgrade amid riots against Kosovo’s declaration of independence. The order for security forces to withdraw could not have been issued except by a top police or government official, but even four years later it still remains a mystery who was in command that day.
Several other cases have also clearly illustrated the strength of Serbian far right militants. During the 2010 gay parade, they demonstrated not only surprisingly high organizational capabilities, but also considerable knowledge of guerrilla tactics in their battle with police. Last year evidence appeared in some media of young Serbs attending Russian camps to learn military skills. Perhaps the most notable example was a few years ago, when leaders of a football hooligan group managed to wiretap police communications prior to a derby match and thus learn about police plans to prevent them from fighting with rival fans.
The overal number of militant extremists in Serbia is estimated to be between ten and fifteen thousand. Most, if not all, of them are well known to the police and intelligence agencies. Professor Zoran Dragišić, a prominent security expert, has asserted that it would have taken the Gendarmerie no more than seventeen minutes to arrest the vast majority of violent militants. So far there has been no indication of political will to order such a nationwide police operation. It’s high time.
PS from Daniel Serwer 2 October: Milan is not the only Serbian citizen who sees possible cancellation of the parade as reflecting badly on the security services.
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The closer
We hear a lot more about international intervention missions opening than we do about their closing. This is not as it should be. While some of them are conceived as holding operations without clear end-states, most these days are intended to achieve something. Then they should close.
Four and a half years after Kosovo declared independence, Pieter Feith stopped by Washington to report on what his International Civilian Office (ICO), which closed last week, achieved in implementing the Comprehensive Peace Settlement (Athisaari plan) and consider what still needs to be done. This is Pieter’s second closing: he also implemented an Ahtisaari plan for Acheh in Indonesia, closing the European Union mission there in 2006.
To make a long story short, the Albanians accepted the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo independence but the Serbs rejected it. The Kosovars declared independence anyway, in coordination with supporters like the United States and most of the European Union, as well as its immediate neighbors. That support was conditional on implementing the Ahtissari plan, under the supervision of the ICO.
The result is a state with its critical institutions in place: not only a constitution with ample protection for minorities as well as a parliament and executive with guaranteed minority representation, but also a constitutional court that has taken some courageous decisions, a privatization agency, a property claims commission, judicial and prosecutorial councils, a Serbian-speaking radio and television channel, a Kosovo Security Force about to be declared fully operational by NATO, ample decentralization, five new majority Serb municipalities (with Serb mayors and police chiefs). The border with Macedonia, long a source of friction, has been demarcated. Those who say, and some do, that Kosovo hasn’t made any progress are talking nonsense.
Kosovo now has a single legal framework. The Ahtisaari plan is history. All the provisions that could be implemented by Pristina acting alone have been passed in parliament. But there are some things that are beyond Pristina’s reach, most notably control of the northern bit of Kosovo, which is still in Serb hands (though whose is sometimes uncertain). The best Pristina has been able to do so far is establish a municipal administrative office for the north that is providing services (business permits, drivers’ licenses) as well as initiating infrastructure and other projects. Going farther will require developing a strong consensus among the political parties in Kosovo on a common platform for the north.
The division of the north from the rest of Kosovo cannot be allowed to continue, creating a new and interminable “frozen conflict” and possibly opening a Pandora’s box of destabilization (of Macedonia and Bosnia in particular). Pristina needs to reach out to the north, with help from the EU, KFOR (the NATO force that still has 5-6000 soldiers in place) and EULEX. Decentralization will be part of the solution, as it has been in the rest of Kosovo. The health and education sectors have to continue to have close relations with Belgrade, but these should be made transparent. The EU, in particular the Germans, will insist on progress in the north as a condition for proceeding towards Serbian and Kosovar membership.
The EU, guided by the Stabilization and Association process and eventually by the accession process, will now be the main international engine in Kosovo, emphasizing rule of law (its EULEX mission at its peak had 2000 employees), transitional justice and reconciliation. This last is of particular importance and requires a grassroots effort that is regional in scope. REKOM, Natasa Kandic’s project, merited particular mention. The EU will also be strong on regional integration of transportation and energy systems. There will be no grand EU Marshall plan or other “leap of imagination” in Kosovo.
The American role is still strong. It will need to gradually diminish, allowing the Kosovo institutions to take on more responsibility. The EU will be the main monitor of implementation in Kosovo, as it prepares for the visa waiver, a Stabilization and Association agreement and eventual membership.
On lessons learned, Feith offered a savvy few:
1. Missions need to focus on exit strategy from the beginning (“achieve and leave” was the motto in Kosovo). Providing support is good, local ownership is better.
2. Combined European and American support for ICO gave it leverage.
3. Lack of UN Security Council approval and Belgrade agreement to the Ahtisaari plan was a serious hindrance, but not an insurmountable one.
4. Partly to avoid the implication that Kosovo was not fully sovereign, the ICO never used its “corrective” powers to veto legislation or fire officials (though it did appoint officials). This was useful for gaining local ownership.
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My Kosovo, past and future
Friends in Pristina asked me for a personal reflection on Kosovo’s past and future on the occasion of the end of supervised independence, to be marked tomorrow. I prepared this:
I first saw Kosovo sometime in 1998. It was at war. Less than 15 years later, it is not only at peace but also an independent state capable of fulfilling the complex and difficult requirements of the Comprehensive Peace Settlement that Belgrade rejected but Pristina accepted. How did Kosovo get from there to here, and where does it go next?
My memories of that first visit to Kosovo are now hazy. But it would be hard to forget visiting the Council for Human Rights and Freedoms, where our U.S. Institute of Peace delegation was shown documentation of human rights abuses. We also visited the Serbian administration of the province, which denied the abuses and refused our invitation to visit the Council less than 200 meters away. We drove out to Malisheva, where there had been vicious attacks by both Albanians and Serbs. We ran into a Kosovo Liberation Army contingent as well as the Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM).
After the war, I would focus on restoring relationships: first among Albanians at Lansdowne in 1999, then between Kosovo and Belgrade Serbs at a meeting in Sofia in 2000, and later between Serbs and Albanians in Gjilan/Gnijlane and other municipalities as well as at the Kosovo-wide level (Airlie House). Throughout I had the support of both Serbs—several of whom were senior fellows at USIP—and Albanians. The Bajraktari brothers worked for me in the 2000s, got masters’ degrees at Princeton and Harvard and now serve as U.S. government officials in the White House and Defense Department.
Later I would go back to the same building in which I had met the Serb administrators to see Jock Covey, Gary Matthews, Bernard Kouchner and Hans Haekkerup, the UN administrators. Michael Steiner, with whom I worked at Dayton, had moved to a different building, now being renovated for the Kosovo Foreign Ministry. I don’t remember having had the pleasure of seeing Soren Jessen-Petersen in Pristina, but he would come for private chats from time to time in Washington, as did Kai Eide, Nebojsa Covic, Dusan Batakovic, Father Sava, Bishop Artemije, Ramush Haradinaj, Veton Surroi, Rada Trajkovic, Hashim Thaci, Alush Gashi and many others. On visits to Pristina I would call on Ibrahim Rugova, who served Coke and loaded my pockets with rocks—they are still here in my office.
Gradually, it became far more important to talk with Kosovans (I gather that is the dissonant but accepted non-ethnic term for those who regard Kosovo as their home) than with internationals. Today the American Ambassador still carries great weight in Kosovo, but she will be the last of the internationals to trump the locals. Pieter Feith, who had “Bonn”-type powers to legislate and remove officials, wisely never used them. The termination of his International Civilian Office is a sign of real progress, even if some see the glass as half empty. The UN Mission in Kosovo has only a minor role. EULEX, the European Union Rule of Law Mission, still provides international prosecutors and judges, but its overstaffing is now being reduced. The Organization for Security and Cooperation Europe (OSCE) will likely be one of the last pillars standing among the internationals, as its democratization efforts are all too obviously needed to support free and fair elections, free media and an open society.
There is real progress in Kosovo, but it is not enough to satisfy me. I have two concerns: international and internal.
The ninety-odd international recognitions that Kosovo rightly vaunts have not been easy to get, but the country needs more. The Belgrade campaign against recognition and UN membership is unworthy of a good neighbor, but it has been more successful than many of us expected and is likely to continue. Rather than entering easily into the General Assembly without many bilateral recognitions, as so many new states do, Kosovo is going to have to accumulate the 130 or so recognitions required for a 2/3 majority. Even then, the problem of the Russian veto will make approval in the UN Security Council a matter for high-level diplomacy.
The internal problems are also important. There can be no doubt about the legitimacy of Kosovo’s institutions for the overwhelming majority of the population. No one even proposed a referendum on independence because the outcome was so obvious. But legitimacy has to be maintained, not just won once. There are two sets of issues, one old and declining, the other newer and growing. The first is among the Serbs. The second is among the Albanians. The issues are related. Both also affect the question of international legitimacy.
Few Serbs welcomed Kosovo independence, but many south of the Ibar river have accepted it. They enjoy their rights to self-governance under the Ahtisaari plan and participate in Kosovo institutions, but there are too few of them. Belgrade never hesitates to cite the low numbers of returns and the high, often exaggerated, numbers of refugees still in Serbia proper, but of course it does not encourage returns because that would legitimize the Kosovo institutions.
It is the duty of the loyal Kosovar to try to repair this situation by making it clear that Serbs are welcome to return. This means treating them properly, protecting them from abuse and respecting their rights. I understand that for some people this is difficult, because of the bad treatment of Albanians under the Serbian administration. But it is the right thing to do, and the best thing for the sake of Kosovo and international recognition. No one in Madrid is going to consider recognizing Kosovo if there is even a hint of Serbs being mistreated there.
There is a second problem among Albanians. The Kosovo state is independent, but it is still limited in some respects. I see the glass as half full. Some of the limitations most people in Kosovo welcome—I don’t know anyone who wants NATO to leave. It is very convenient to have international prosecutors and judges in the Kosovo judicial system, so that inter-ethnic cases can be handled and the constitutional court can make difficult decisions. But other restraints are perceived by many Kosovars as unjust. Some would even resort to violence to change the situation, for example in the north. Others might like Kosovo, in contradiction of its constitution, to give up on independence and join Albania.
Apart from the international constraints, there is also a strong feeling in parts of the Albanian population that the Kosovo state has not created sufficient economic opportunity and is corrupt. As a foreigner who does not have investments in Kosovo, it is hard for me to know how bad the situation is, but when a prominent lawyer suggests to me that no prisoner can hope to get an easy sentence without paying a bribe, I get worried. I worry too about rumors of trafficking in people and drugs, about reports of nepotistic hiring, about apparent irregularities in government procurement.
Let me be clear. Do I know that things are worse in Kosovo than in Serbia, Macedonia or Albania? I do not. Years ago when I complained to a Serbian deputy prime minister about corruption in Kosovo he replied: don’t kid yourself, all the organized crime bosses are still in Belgrade. But Kosovo is still a new and not yet firmly established state, one that desperately needs international recognition. To get what it wants, Kosovo needs to show that it can clean its own house.
I speak bluntly. It is my way. But I also dream big.
My dream is that Kosovo, having worked itself out of international supervision, continues to do the right things: it treats Serbs correctly and gets more of them back to their homes, it protects the churches and monasteries, it conducts a serious effort against corruption and organized crime, it cleans up its elections, it finds a way to cooperate with Belgrade in implementing the Ahtisaari plan and establishes the rule of law on its entire territory. Foreign investment pours in, factories and call centers go up, agriculture thrives. The Kosovo security forces, finding little role for themselves at home, begin to deploy in NATO operations. Kosovo joins Partnership for Peace, becomes a candidate for NATO and EU membership and gets a date to begin EU negotiations.
Time flies. It is 2020. Kosovo is now a member of NATO, which has withdrawn KFOR. Pristina has accelerated its preparations for European Union membership and is now catching up with Belgrade. The two presidents decide to meet EU demands for good neighborly relations by recognizing each other and establishing diplomatic relations. The American ambassador, respected but no longer a viceroy, is surprised but pleased. Some aging Kosovar politicians insist on a referendum on EU membership and on recognition of Serbia, which passes overwhelmingly. Membership is scheduled for 2022. I’d like to be in Pristina for that!
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Footnote to a footnote
Some of my readers will remember **********************************************, as well as a follow-up post on the question of how Kosovo is to be identified at international meetings in Europe when Serbia is present. I am pleased to note that Belgrade reportedly has seen the light on this one and no longer insists that the entire footnote be reproduced on Kosovo’s nameplate, but rather in documentation following the meeting.
The footnote references UN Security Council resolution 1244, which foresees a political process leading to a decision on Kosovo’s final status, as well as the International Court of Justice decision advising that Kosovo’s declaration of independence breached no international law. As these items condition Serbia’s sovereignty more than Kosovo’s, I see no particular harm in them, even if Belgrade continues to assert that the footnote distinguishes Kosovo from other sovereign states. The asterisk really belongs to Serbia*.
Kosovo is however different from other sovereign states, because it has lived under a regime of limited sovereignty imposed as a condition of its independence by the internationally supported Comprehensive Settlement Proposal (the Ahtisaari plan). An important component of the limitations is to be lifted September 10/11, when the International Civilian Office (ICO) in Kosovo terminates its work supervising the implementation of the Ahtisaari plan. This is one of those rare moments when an international mission manages to work itself out of a job, completing what it set out to do. Credit is due to Pieter Feith, the Dutch head of the ICO, who is repeating: he also completed an EU mission in Aceh, Indonesia, some years ago. I’ll be interested in seeing which mission he gets to close next.
Some of my friends think the ICO’s termination is not a good thing, since it is the one international organization in Kosovo clearly associated with the country’s independence. I, too, would rather see some of the other organizations, especially UNMIK, disappear, but that isn’t going to happen without Belgrade’s concurrence. The best that can be hoped for is that it withers away, which is pretty much what is happening.
The state-building process in Kosovo is not finished once ICO disappears and UNMIK withers. Only the formal international supervision of Ahtisaari plan implementation has reached an end. There are many other ways in which Kosovo remains without the full attributes of sovereignty. It still lacks security forces that can defend its territory. This restriction is scheduled for reevaluation in 2013. It has international prosecutors and judges in its court system. These I understand Kosovo will extend, along with the EU rule of law mission EULEX, until 2014. While my friends at KIPRED have catalogued the many ways in which Kosovo remains under international constraints, in my view a new state does well to move cautiously in claiming its sovereign powers, if only because that will enable it to attract significant support from the international community.
The day is coming though when the five EU members that have not yet recognized Pristina (even if they all I believe maintain diplomatic representation there) should drop their reluctance and accept Kosovo as sovereign and independent. Their failure to do so has prolonged Belgrade’s resistance and given some there to hope for partition, which would encourage similar moves in Bosnia and Cyprus.
The EU needs to insist that Belgrade give up its de facto domination of northern Kosovo in favor of the decentralized governance guaranteed by the Ahtissari plan. That can be done by a single EU member acting alone to block a date for Serbia’s accession talks to begin. I expect Germany will do that if necessary. But the EU would do much better to act as 27. That would be no footnote. It would deserve an ! rather than a *.
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Autopilot to a crash landing
Kurt Bassuener of the Democratization Policy Council, who lives and works in Sarajevo, reacted to my latest on Bosnia with a letter too detailed and interesting to hide in a comment, but stop reading here if you are not interested in the Balkans:
Hi Dan,
Bosnia and Herzegovina is at risk. I stand by my conclusion that any dissolution will be violent. My colleague Bodo Weber and the Atlantic Initiative’s Vlado Azinović, as you know, enumerated the potential conflict factors last October in our security risk analysis. The situation has worsened since.
You’re dead right to note Sandžak as a factor. I am certain that the distinct minority who espouse a Bosniak {Muslim} national state have it in mind as part of the equation. Republika Srpska President Dodik wouldn’t care because
a) it wouldn’t come out of the territory he controls,
b) it would strengthen his position vis-a-vis Belgrade.
But a Bosniak state would be exceedingly hard to sell – it would have to be presented as a fait accompli, saving what could be saved. The last time it was tried, in 1993 with the besieged Republic of BiH fighting both the Serb Republic Army and the Croat Defense Force, the Bosniaks still refused, despite the adverse conditions.
Were I good at detachment, I could almost enjoy watching the political circus here. It looks as if Dodik has assembled the votes to oust Social Democratic Party (SDP) leader Zlatko Lagumdžija from his post as foreign minister. For the past seven months, Lagumdžija has effectively acted as an unwitting agent of Dodik’s agenda. Now that total political chaos reigns in the Federation, Dodik is demonstrating who’s boss by demanding his ministry back.
This was an Icarus experience for Lagumdžija. He apparently thought he could lead the Federation in such a way as to compete with the RS and exercise equal influence in the state. Haris Silajdžić, albeit from a different post, held similar pretensions in the last government. But given the diffusion of power in the Federation, as well as the view from Banja Luka that state competences inherently infringe on entity competences, whoever rules the RS effectively rules the state by default. The SDP is likely to get hammered in the local elections. The sense of betrayal among its voter base is massive.
In a conversation with a friend recently, I remarked that Lagumdžija had served Dodik’s agenda, albeit I doubt he saw it that way. My friend’s retort was that he thought that Croat political leader Čović had done that. But Čović at least recognized he was getting into a subservient relationship with Dodik, in the hope that he’ll get the crumbs of a divided BiH – de jure or de facto.
I knew when this state-level government was formed that nothing could be done, given its configuration – at least nothing real. Lagumdžija is pushing for anything that will allow for BiH to apply for EU candidacy, however hopeless that application would be at present on both sides of the equation. Hence the ridiculous deal on how to implement the Sejdić-Finci European Court of Human Rights ruling of December 2009. While it might not put wind in his sails politically, I suspect the EU would jump at the chance to take any Sejdić-Finci arrangement to declare progress.
The fun part of all of this is that Dodik can be forgiven for banking on intra-Bosniak political fratricide as a force multiplier for his playing the long game toward independence – delegitimizing the state, “proving” it’s impossible (with dependable help from within the Bosnian Federation) to the EU (with a lot of uptake among the continentals – especially the European Commission). But it probably won’t be the Federation’s party leaders who literally call the shots when it boils over – and it will if this continues. It’s more likely to be veterans’ organizations or other parallel structures.
So while you’re probably right that there is little interest in recognizing an independent RS, at least in most Western capitals, there is also no will to shift out of the bureaucratic autopilot we’re in, which ultimately ends in violence. That would make this that much worse. Only external actors are in a position to arrest this trajectory. They’re just not willing to do so. The bill will still land on their doorstep, whether they want to admit that to themselves or not. Total myopia…
Germany recently laid down two markers in rapid succession – the Ambassador said OHR has a negative effect in BiH and Germany announced its withdrawal from EUFOR. The number of troops is insignificant – three, as I understand. But the point was to make clear that the time for executive mandates is past. The Chapter 7 mandate comes up for renewal by the Security Council in November. Significantly, Dodik has embraced ending the EUFOR mandate for the first time. Previously, the RS had been for keeping EUFOR while closing OHR. The Russians are all for booting both OHR and EUFOR. In Banja Luka last month, the Russian Ambassador mooted BiH/RS joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Cheers,
Kurt
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Bear hug
Milan Marinković of Niš continues his series on the new government in Belgrade:
Last week Serbian defense minister Aleksandar Vučić spent a few days in his first official visit to Russia. After meeting with Russian deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, who previously served as ambassador to NATO, Vučić told media the two sides agreed to engage in defense industry cooperation. The project would involve joint participation in the international market. In relation to this, Vučić announced that Serbia was going to open a factory for manufacturing complex military systems.
The agreement is currently in the preliminary stage. An expert team should be formed soon to work out specific details. In Serbia analysts are divided on potential effects of the cooperation. Some believe it could benefit Serbia’s defense industry, which is already a successful exporter of military equipment to third-world countries. Others are more cautious due to insufficient information and fear that Russia will obtain too much influence in Serbia.
The likely strengthening of military ties between Russia and Serbia is not a surprise. Shortly after becoming defense minister, Aleksandar Vučić said that Serbia, as a “militarily neutral“ country, will not join NATO or any other military alliance, but remains free to develop bilateral relationships with anyone. He praised good cooperation of the Serbian army with the Ohio National Guard, but criticized his predecessor for neglecting “other parts of the world” – notably Russia. Although Vučić’s narrative suggests that Belgrade is planning to keep on walking a thin line between East and West, for the moment it appears to be tacking East.
It is not only in defense affairs that Russo-Serbian relations are on the increase, but also in the economy. Russia says it is seriously interested to take part in vital infrastructure projects in Serbia as a major investor. The Serbian government has admitted it may have to sell several state-owned monopolies in order to reduce the ever growing budget deficit and public debt. Instead of private companies – either foreign or domestic – the most likely candidate to buy some of these is the Russian state. Russia is also frequently mentioned as a potential buyer of the steel factory in the town of Smederevo, which Serbia recently re-nationalized following the withdrawal of U.S. Steel from ownership of the factory.
Serbia is thus slowly but surely getting sucked into Russia’s sphere of influence. Being almost devastated economically, Serbia is in no position – and generally has no reason – to antagonize any country, and certainly not one like Russia, which is a force to be reckoned with even when at its weakest. Serbia needs good relations with Moscow. But having a good relationship is quite different from building a strategic partnership. If Serbia is still committed to European integration, as its government claims, then it must seek major allies among leading EU states as much as in the Kremlin.
A big part of the orientation towards Russia is based on populism. Serbs love Russia, including many who also support the country’s bid for EU membership. Vladimir Putin would no doubt win presidential elections in Serbia by a large margin if he were eligible to run. At the same time, the ongoing economic crisis is making the EU look less attractive in the eyes of the Serbian public – as evidenced by latest opinion polls.
Russia’s deep pockets may help save Serbia in the short-term. The question is whether Serb affection for Russia will be good or bad for Serbia and its European ambitions in the long run.
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