Tag Archives: Serbia

And Macedonia makes 50

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Montenegro and Macedonia recognized Kosovo yesterday. Coincidentally, this raises the number of countries recognizing to exactly 50.

Macedonia and Montenegro are small countries, but they have outsized importance because (1) they’re neighbors of both Serbia and Kosovo, (2) they’re EU-members-to-be, and (3) they’re former Yugoslav Republics. So while this is no surprise, it’s still interesting.

I had some thoughts on this, but Radio Free Europe has already beaten me to most of them. (Yes, yes, I know about RFE. It’s a good article anyway, check it out.) One particularly interesting point: by co-ordinating their recognition, the two countries have given each other a certain amount of cover, diplomatically speaking.

I’ve said before that I expect a slow trickle of countries recognizing Kosovo gradually tapering off, until a plateau of between 50 and 60 is reached sometime next year. We’ll see soon enough!

Kosovo 46, South Ossetia 2?

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I wanted to write a post comparing Kosovo and South Ossetia, but Dan Drezner has already written it. It’s a week old now, but still good:

It’s been more than a week since Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. The number of other countries that have followed Russia’s lead is…. well, maybe one (Nicaragua), as near as I can tell. Belarus keeps promising that they’ll get around to it, and Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko has defended Russia’s recognition decision; since that initial promise, however, Belarus appears to have decided to sit on their hands. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez has expressed similar support of Russia’s recognition decision – but I haven’t seen any actual recognition from Caracas either… Vedomosti reports that, “It appears that the Russian government has reconciled itself to the fact that no other country has recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said yesterday the reluctance of other states to recognize the independence of the breakaway Georgian territories was not critical.”

As they say, read the whole thing — there are lots of interesting links and some thoughtful discussion of whether recognition was really such a good idea for Russia.

You want to bring along a grain of salt, because Drezner — like a lot of American conservatives — is a mild Russophobe. I note that he thinks the war was a serious economic setback for Russia, a position that Harvard B-School professor Noel Maurer sharply disagrees with. (Key quote: “Markets do not punish successful aggressors.”) Read ’em both and decide for yourself.
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Serbia’s Radical Party: strange convulsions

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“Strange are the convulsions of defeat.” — Winston Churchill

So Serbia’s Radical Party, having lost two Presidential and three Parliamentary elections in a row, is breaking up. Sort of.

If you’re not a Serbia-watcher, here’s the short version: the Radicals are Serbia’s Obnoxious Populist Nationalist Party. Most Balkan countries have OPMPs. If they can corner the entire OPMP vote, they typically poll around 25%… sometimes lower, never much higher. Which in most places makes them a nuisance, maybe a very large nuisance, but not a serious threat.

What makes the Radicals different from, say, “Attack” in Bulgaria or Vadim Tudor’s Greater Romania Party is Serbia’s unhappy recent history. While “Attack” and such may have a lot of members who fantasize wistfully about gathering members of unpopular and despised minorities together, killing them, and dumping their bodies in a nearby large body of water, the Radical Party includes a number of people who have actually done so. In fact, its leader is currently on trial in the Hague for war crimes. Continue reading →

Russia has BFFs too

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Not many, but some.

One is Armenia. The Armenians are annoyed at the Georgians for their generally shoddy treatment of the Armenian minority in Georgia. More to the point, Armenians generally look down their magnificent noses at Georgians, considering them self-indulgent, emotional, shrill, slovenly, unreliable, and just generally second-rate. Georgians don’t love Armenians either — they consider them sly, stuck-up and grasping. There are no exactly equivalent Western European stereotypes, but if you think “dour Scots versus hand-waving Italians” you’ll get the general idea.
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Karadzic arrested!?

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Breaking news in the last hour is that Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade. Karadzic, you may recall, was the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He’s under indictment for about twenty different war crimes, and has been on the run since 1996.

Few details are available yet. The arrest was made in Belgrade earlier today. It’s not clear by whom. (The Serbian Ministry of the Interior, which controls the police, issued a brief statement saying it was not involved.) The Serbian government formally notified the Hague Tribunal this afternoon.

As always in these matters, there’s some mystery and confusion. Just last week, officials in both Serbia and the Republika Srpska had announced that they didn’t believe Karadzic was in their countries. This was actually plausible! The new Serbian government had just arrested another war criminal in Belgrade a few weeks ago. So you’d think Karadzic would have stayed well clear.

Was he simply stupid? Or was he lured back to Belgrade somehow? Or was he there all along? If the latter, then former Prime Minister Kostunica surely knew about it… and was lying his ass off to the Hague and the world for five years straight. I’m no fan of Kostunica, but I’d hate to think that.

On a personal note: for years my wife has said that Karadzic was living “down the street” from us back in the early 2000s. At that time, we were living in the street Golsfortieva (that’s Serbian for “Galsworthy”) in the neighborhood of Vracar in central Belgrade. She picked this up from talking with the neighbors, and for five years it’s been a running joke in our house. “Right down the street from us!” “Right, sure, yes, dear. Whatever, okay.”

Well, at least one source is claiming that the arrest was made in… the neighborhood of Vracar, in central Belgrade. Headline: Blogger’s Wife ‘Very Satisfied’ By Arrest.

Anyway. A day or two may pass without much news, as under Serbian law the accused has the right to challenge certain aspects of his arrest — most notably, whether or not he’s really the person in question.

Still: great news, if true.

Serbia has a new government!

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It took just 57 days, which by Serbian standards is pretty quick. It’s a strange beast, with Milosevic’s old Socialist party riding shotgun on a coalition of pro-Western liberals and technocrats, but it’s actually less insane than what they had before. In order to make it work, they had to pass a Law on Government authorizing a whopping 28 Ministers or Ministry-level positions… it was the only way they could keep all coalition members satisfied.

The new PM is Mirko Cvetkovic. I knew him slightly when he worked as Deputy Minister for Privatization a few years back. He struck me as intelligent, hard-working, focused, and tough, but also as stubborn, gruff, and not inclined to suffer fools gladly. Those are just one man’s impressions from several years ago, so take them with a grain of salt.

This is the most liberal government Serbia has had since Zoran Djindjic was shot back in March 2003. (I don’t include Djindjic’s hapless successor Zivkovic.) It’s worth recalling that when Djindjic was shot, his approval ratings were in single digits… which is one reason his killers thought they could get away with it. I’m just sayin’.

The new government inherits various problems that will be tiresomely familiar to anyone interested in Serbia, and one big new one: how to handle the issue of Kosovo independence. Should be interesting to watch.

Finally, via Eric Gordy, here’s the “form your own Serbian government!” game. (You don’t have to read Serbian: it’s pretty self-explanatory.) I think they made it too easy to win… but then I suppose a realistically hard version would take around 55 days to play. I also think this could be turned into a real tool by some clever young political science grad student somewhere.

Anyway, congratulations to the new government, and good luck.

[Update: Welcome, Andrew Sullivan readers. If you’re interested in Balkan stuff, check out our archives. This is a group blog, so if you like something, most of the individual authors have home blogs — you can find mine over here.]

Kosovo and the UNSC

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Anybody who’s interested in Kosovo has long since bookmarked this incredibly useful page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see that it lists every country that has recognized Kosovo (current tally: 43) plus the official statements of almost every country that hasn’t.

That’s plenty of fun reading by itself, but it gets even more interesting when you compare it to another list: the members of the United Nations Security Council. Continue reading →

Serbia almost has a government!

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It looks like Boris Tadic’s Democrats have hammered out a coalition with the small but crucial-for-a-majority Socialists. They tried to convene Parliament a couple of days ago, but the soon-to-be-opposition parties disrupted it. They’re trying again today.

If they do form a government, it would be after a mere 44 days of negotiation. This is, by Serbian standards, blinding speed; both the last two majorities took over 100 days to hammer out.

The negotiations for the new government have been shrouded, not so much in secrecy, as in disinformation and confusion. So it’s not yet clear who’ll have which Ministry, nor what prices are being demanded and paid.

The new government will, we are told, be more “pro-European”. Just what that means remains to be seen. It’s pretty clear they won’t be interested in meaningful negotiation over Kosovo; the best that can be hoped for is that they won’t continue the previous government’s policy of half-heartedly trying to stir up trouble in Kosovo’s Serb-majority north.

Still, watching with interest.

And then there were three

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Unexpected good news from Serbia: police have picked up Stojan Zupljanin, one of the four remaining war crimes suspects still at large.

Zupljanin is a pretty good catch. He was a medium-big fish: a police administrator in Yugoslav times, he became head of all police in the Serb part of Bosnia. He was deeply involved in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats, and then a bit later he had administrative authority over the detention camps where hundreds died and thousands more were beaten, starved and tortured. (A copy of the ICTY indictment against him can be found here.) You could maybe call him the Ernst Kaltenbrunner of wartime Bosnia.

There was a € 250,000 Euro award for his arrest; it’s not clear who, if anyone, is collecting this. In fact, the circumstances of his arrest are still murky. He was picked up in Pancevo, a suburb of Belgrade — it’s just across the Danube to the north. Continue reading →