Word: serbia
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...government. And E.U. officials were pleased with the austere 2010 budget approved by Serbian lawmakers Monday that meets the strict terms of a recent International Monetary Fund loan. Belgrade is also rethinking its military options after neighbors Albania and Croatia joined NATO earlier this year, meaning most of Serbia is now surrounded by the alliance that bombed it in 1999. Serbia has already joined NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, a cooperation framework for NATO member aspirants. (See the top news stories of the year...
...despite Serbia's newfound enthusiasm for the rest of Europe, officials caution against expecting any swift E.U. accession. Slovenia is the only former Yugoslav republic that has managed to join the bloc; Serbia now joins Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Turkey and Iceland in an ever-lengthening line of aspiring candidates. Almost all of the other applicants are further along the path to membership. And within the E.U., there is growing resistance toward adding new members, a sentiment known as "enlargement fatigue" following the recent accession of a dozen mainly eastern European countries...
...biggest obstacle to Serbia's membership is the past -specifically Belgrade's inability to face up to the baleful legacy of the Balkan wars. The E.U. has made the capture of war fugitives Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic a precondition to even starting membership negotiations. The two men are believed to be hiding in the Serbian mountains under the tacit protection of key politicians. The Netherlands is particularly keen to see the arrest of Mladic, a Bosnian Serb general indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on genocide charges for his alleged role in the slaughter...
...Another barrier to membership is Serbia's continuing belligerence toward Kosovo, where about 10,000 people were killed and 850,000 driven from their homes during the war. Although NATO ousted Belgrade's tanks from the territory in 1999, Serbia still refuses to accept the loss of its province. Indeed, Serbia's condemnation of Kosovo's declaration of independence last year even raised concerns about a possible new military intervention. "Serbia still needs to come to terms with the war crimes of the 1990s and go through the painful but essential process of breaking from the stranglehold of the nationalist...
...says Serbia is much further along than it was even just a few years ago - a testament to recent efforts by the E.U. to reach out to the country. "It testifies to the effectiveness of European leverage and shows that the E.U.'s democratic inclusion process is working," de Vasconcelos says. "It shows the soft power of the E.U., the power of attraction -that any European destiny is linked with democratization...