Pragmatism Wins in Serbia

A deadline and tens of millions of dollars can wonderfully concentrate the mind, as the pragmatic rulers of Serbia are proving. Again.

On Tuesday Serbia handed over 145 ethnic Albanians it had held since the 1998-99 war in the Serbian province of Kosovo. On Wednesday the government agreed to clear the way for suspected war criminals to be extradited from Serbia to the U.N. court at The Hague, where former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is already on trial for atrocities that his forces committed in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia.

It was at the end of March a year ago that Serbia arrested Milosevic. Then as now it faced a deadline from the U.S. Congress to act or forfeit money desperately needed in a country shattered by war.

Yugoslavia, now down to the provinces of Serbia and Montenegro, is run by President Vojislav Kostunica, but Serbia is the bigger and its prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, increasingly is at odds with Kostunica. The Yugoslav president opposed extraditing alleged criminals to The Hague until some vague future time when Yugoslavia adopted a special law on such handovers.

The Yugoslavian court formed to decide constitutional questions, which is dominated by Serbian nationalists, also chimed in, saying the U.N. statute establishing the war crimes tribunal could not be applied in Serbia. Djindjic’s government ignored that ruling.

Its next step should be arresting the war crimes suspects and shipping them off to The Hague. The most prominent of the accused believed to still be in Serbia is Ratko Mladic, the general indicted by the U.N. tribunal for the siege of Sarajevo and a 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslim men and boys in Srebenica. This month NATO-led peacekeepers conducted an unsuccessful search for Mladic’s boss, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The West was far too slow to step in and end the violence that ravaged the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, and it must not be too quick to leave (a lesson that applies equally in Afghanistan). But this week’s events demonstrated the wisdom of Congress’ demands that Yugoslavia cooperate with the U.N. tribunal and that it release the Albanian prisoners if it wanted more funds.

Djindjic has been in power little over a year, but he has shown he understands what must be done to help his nation recover. That has certainly not always been the case with Yugoslav leaders.