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After 16 years of being on the run, The Hague’s Tribunal most wanted, Ratko Mladic, has been found and arrested. Very little is known about who had been harboring and helping him all this time, even though the government had promised that this too will be revealed. Citizens are however doubtful of this promise since similar promises were given after Radovan Karadzic’s arrest but so far nothing has happened with that. All we found out is that he had spent years flaunting himself under the noses of the secret police.
Even though they had been expected there were no mass demonstrations after Mladic’s arrest, there were only some incidents in Belgrade. In this regard there was one surprising contradiction. On one hand, citizens had taken the news of Mladic’s arrest with a striking indifference, while on the other, according to results of research of public opinion, most citizens of Serbia were against the general’s extradition. Aside from Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party, other political parties had justified his arrest by stressing that with this move Serbia had made a big step toward the European Union.
They hardly at all dealt with the social context of the indictment formulated in The Hague International Criminal Tribunal for War Crimes on the Territories of Former Yugoslavia. The verdict will obviously be given by the mentioned court in The Hague, but Serbian society should have given its judgment on the war politics embodied by Mladic, and in this regard it is not Mladic’s personality which is important but the ideas that had led to war.
And when it comes to this question the past of the political elites still has to be dealt with. Documents from the nineties testify that Serbian political parties – with the exception of some miniscule ones – even though they condemned Milosevic’s politics also spoke in a contradictory manner about war goals. It is this contradiction where Mladic’s popularity takes hold. And this is precisely why President Tadic was right on mark when he said that Serbia needs a change of cultural model – but this is something we will have to wait on for a while.
In any case, Mladic is now in The Hague, even though only trivial information was publicized about his arrest. For now therefore we do not know who assisted him in hiding or what the political background for this endeavor was. One important sentence was however been uttered – which partly sheds some light on this question. “Who are you going to blame now? You voted for Milosevic yourselves”, supposedly Ratko Mladic stated after his arrest. This sentence indicates that Mladic will strive to put the blame on the Serbian authorities. This is why professor Radoslav Stojanovic, previously a representative of Serbia at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, does not exclude the possibility (and this is no accident) that Ratko Mladic’s defense will be that everything he did – he did in accordance with the instructions of Belgrade authorities. In the opinion of the aforementioned legal expert for international law, Mladic had nothing to do with Milosevic and therefore it will be difficult for him to document his direct connection to Serbia’s previous leader. But if the court should believe Mladic it is likely that Bosnia and Herzegovina will ask for a renewal of their case against Serbia. Namely, the current and standing decision of the International Court of Justice in the Hague states that Serbia was merely indirectly responsible for the genocide committed in Srebrenica, however, if Mladic were to testify in front of The Hague criminal court for war crimes about his connections with Serbia – if these really existed – then the International Court of Justice may, in an renewed case which could possibly happen, judge Serbia to be guilty of genocide. Professor Stojanovic however hopes that the Hague Tribunal will not take Mladic’s word for it. But this argument shows that Mladic is, from the point of view of Serbian state interests, a figure of key importance. More important than Milosevic.
Politicians are therefore pointing to The Hague, as is The Hague should cut the Gordian knot. As if it weren’t their job to uncover the political context of individual responsibility and say what they think about it. Even the media have taken a step back – the best example being the Belgrade “Ninety-Two”. After Mladic’s arrest they organized a debate with two opposed sides – two supporters and two opposed who spared no words when criticizing the general’s work and persona. The show’s host posed no adequate questions and with a smile tolerated while the supporters (even before the verdict has been handed down) vented on European politics and boasted Mladic’s work – all of this was done by people who compared the International Criminal Court to Stalin’s gulags. After this event the editors of the Pescanik radio show, which is broadcast by “Ninety-Two”, expressed their view that this media house should apologize to its viewers but the management of the said media house declined with the explanation that a commercial TV station has the right to hear both sides. The said editors of Pescanik then decided to take their show off the air from B92.
There is of course no doubt that Ratko Mladic’s extradition helps Serbia’s European integrations. There is the question of what kind of response it will be met with among the citizen-voters at the elections. While parties may have reached some sort of loose and unstable consensus regarding accession to the European Union, the popularity of this accession has fallen among the citizens of Serbia.
In previously socialist countries national-populist movements are on the rise, as well as extremist organizations and parties and with them an anti-European movement. But this does not mean, not at all, that they want a return to socialism – on the contrary – anti-communism has never been so strong as it is now when the socialist utopia has left the scene and when parties of the left, demanding a free market and multi-party system, one after another are losing elections. Along with them the ideological system of liberalism has been shaken. Now it is very clear that in the chain of the European Union the weakest links are made up of new members, post-communist countries. And as these are countries which are mostly in Serbia’s neighborhood it is obvious that this circumstance also influences the citizens’ general stance.
The Middle-Eastern-European national-populism sheds new light on the Balkan conflicts as well – this is the attitude of those who consider the European assessment of Serbian national interest in the nineties as too hasty. So what is going on? The national tensions between Slovakia and Hungary have flared up within the European Union and the Brussels father figures have no uniformed answers to this sensitive minority question. Simultaneously, in other Middle-Eastern-European regions similar conflict situations are piling up. These situations are still only latent, but they are getting stronger just the same. To put it more precisely – they are developing under the umbrella of Middle-Eastern-European and Balkan people’s parties. These parties want to, on one hand, strengthen the idea of a nation state, while on the other they wholeheartedly support the defense of interests of their own people who live as minorities beyond the borders of the (motherland) national state – and this is taking place all over the ethnically diverse regions of Middle-Eastern-Europe and the Balkans. But the ideas of nation states are not possible to further promote without a significant source of nationalistic wind at its back, and it should be kept in mind that majority nationalism radicalizes national minorities: they become all the more aware that all hopes brought forth by the 1989 change of system have been dashed. Democratic parliamentary systems, by themselves, do not solve minority issues. “Majority despotism”, the dangers of which were pointed out by Tocqueville, feeds the Middle-Eastern-European “democratic nationalism” which in turn generates the “democratic anti-minority” mood.
The situation is additionally complicated by the circumstance that the people’s fractions, which dominate the European Parliament, are nurturing the tendencies of strengthening the nation states but they also have no answer to the needs of national minorities. The strongest people’s fraction was not able to, not even internally, bridge the contradictions which stem from its very own idea system. This only deepens the regional crisis and is followed by a great paradox: one of the generators of the paradox is the strongest fraction in the European Parliament.
Serbia is following the development of this situation with great interest - this is obvious from the way Serbian media welcomed with great sympathies the “conservative revolution” (as the Belgrade pro-government daily Politika called it) of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and warned that Belgrade’s politician should follow his path. Viktor Orban’s slogans have become popular; slogans such as: “there is life outside the EU”, or “heading west with the east wind in our backs”. Considering the traditionally strong feeling of friendship Serbian has for Russia, these slogans have fallen on fertile ground. Frequently we hear the question of why should Serbia be doing more in regards to protection of national minority rights than members of the European Union, such as Slovakia or Romania, are prepared to do? Why shouldn’t Serbia also include in the preamble of its Constitution those theses on national consciousness as are contained in the Hungarian Constitution? Why shouldn’t Serbia demand that its national minority in Croatia have the same type of autonomy that Hungary is demanding for its nationals living outside Hungary’s borders? These questions point to the fact that Serbia can be pressured since it is not a member of the European Union, and these questions also represent the starting point of political divergences. According to the opinion of one side it is necessary to join the European Union as soon as possible, since this would help Serbia in accomplishing its rights, while according to others European Union membership is such a long and hard way off that it will be the cause of Serbia’s ruin. The government is currently balancing between these two projections - striving to fulfill the European Union standards, while simultaneously not aggravating the majority of the Serbian populace. Therefore, it seems that Serbia’s journey to the EU is reminiscent of a dramatic dance on a wire.
