The European Union will resume key talks with Serbia on closer ties in the coming days, following the arrest of a general wanted for war crimes, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn announced Friday.
Rehn said the new Serbian government had shown a clear commitment to fully cooperate with the UN war crimes tribunal - the main condition for restarting the talks - both through its programme and in the declarations of its leaders.
"In recent weeks, concrete actions have matched this commitment," he said in a statement from his Brussels office. "I can therefore confirm that the Commission can resume negotiations on a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Serbia (SAA)," he said.
He told reporters in Berlin, after talks there with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Serbian President Boris Tadic, that he expects "we could start these talks in early June." In his statement, Rehn said the Commission would set a date for a round of SAA talks - a first step for Balkans states to join the EU - after chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte visits Serbia, probably on Monday.
Bosnian Serb war-time general Zdravko Tolimir, who is wanted for genocide, was caught Thursday in the eastern Bosnian town of Bratunac in a joint police operation after he crossed the border from Serbia. The EU froze the SAA negotiations a year ago because Serbia was not fully co-operating with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, which indicted Tolimir.
This was mainly due to Belgrade's failure to hand over suspects like former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic - an ally of Tolimir - whom experts say is hiding in Serbia.
But Brussels has softened its line since a new government was formed last month. James Lyon, Balkans advisor at the International Crisis Group think tank, raised doubts about Serbia's real intentions, despite the arrest of Tolimir, indicted for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
"A lot of people think this is a one-off ploy," he said by telephone from Belgrade. "The pattern that has been established is that Serbia does just enough to get SAA talks going and then it stops all cooperation with The Hague. There is reason to believe this is going to happen again."
Despite the EU's new move, Serbia is unlikely to soften its opposition to the United Nations granting "supervised independence" to Kosovo, as the bloc hopes it will. Serbia deeply opposes losing Kosovo and its ally Russia has threatened to use its UN Security Council veto to stop that happening, but it badly wants to reap the economic and political benefits of joining Europe's rich club.
After the talks in Berlin, Tadic said that Belgrade had insisted that granting independence to the breakaway Serbian province was "completely unacceptable." But he added: "There is still a lot of room to manoeuvre in negotiations in the hope of finding a compromise."
When asked whether a resumption of the SAA talks could be expected to encourage Serbia to temper its stance on Kosovo, Lyon said: "No, no chance at all, heavens no." Most Serbs deeply oppose losing Kosovo, making it certain political suicide for any government that permits its independence, and the province is deemed to be an integral part of Serbia under the constitution. For the Serbian press, Tolimir's arrest meant only one thing. "The news that opens Europe's doors," headlined the daily Danas.