The Back of the Crowd.(World Affairs; The Balkans)(Serbia)

Byline: Rod Nordland

Even after handing over a war criminal, Serbia is far from ready to join the EU.

There were two milestones in the Balkans this July: the 13th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when Serb nationalists killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys, and the arrest last week of the fugitive president of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, who is charged as the architect of that and other war crimes. As the Serbian government prepared to send Karadzic off to stand trial at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, there was dancing in Sarajevo and beyond. "This is a historic event, all the more so because the Serbs did it," says Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the end of the war in Bosnia. Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, called Karadzic's arrest "very important for Serbia's European aspirations."

The arrest may yet help Serbia become a member of the European Union. His capture has long been a precondition of accession talks moving forward. What is less clear is if Serbia is remotely ready to meet the other conditions of EU membership, which require candidates to create stable democratic institutions and a competitive market economy--or at least to make moves in the right direction. Since the Dayton peace accords of 1995, Serbian politics has been dominated by nationalists and radicals, and the nation has lost tremendous ground to its neighbors. The former Yugoslav republic of Croatia is well on its way to membership, which Barroso predicts could happen by 2010.

Meanwhile, Serbia has 30 percent unemployment, and with the exception of the agricultural sector, growth has been moribund since dictator Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in 2000. Serbia has yet to finish denationalizing its major industries, or shed its huge numbers of superfluous government employees. "The last eight years have been wasted," says Gerald Knaus, director of the European Stability Initiative. "Neighbors like Bulgaria and Romania are members of the EU, and Serbia is not even a candidate." Although Serbia had been the dominant republic before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, Croatia is at least five years ahead of it in the EU accession process. And that assumes that Serbia will soon deliver its remaining war-crimes fugitives, Gen. Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic.

Then there is Kosovo. While more than 40 countries, including more than two thirds of the EU members and the United States, recognized its February declaration of independence, no mainstream Serbian politician is willing to let Kosovo go, including even Serbia's President Boris Tadic, a liberal who narrowly won election over the nationalists in April. "I don't see how the EU can take in a member who disputes its borders, especially with a neighbor who is also a potential [EU] member," says Holbrooke.

Even if Serbia meets the criteria for entering the EU, its refusal to take responsibility for the Balkan wars bodes poorly for regional stability. Srdjan Bogosavljevic, a Belgrade pollster, says that two thirds of Serbs reject Europe's view that Serbia was the aggressor in the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, and one third even see leaders like Karadzic as war heroes. Only one third think they deserve to be tried as war criminals. Most people, says Bogosavljevic, "are not ready to accept that there were war crimes committed by Serbs." Instead, they see his arrest as a Faustian bargain: the alleged war criminal in exchange for entry into the European Union.