The Joke Called European Values

Serbia’s ruling party set out its position on Mladić the day after he died. Ten days later the president of France received the man at the centre of its system.

Drizan Shala (Security Desk)

On 28 August, the morning after Ratko Mladić died in the Hague detention unit, Miloš Vučević posted a statement on X. Vučević is president of the Serbian Progressive Party and the president’s adviser for regional affairs. Tanjug carried the text within the hour, then B92, Novosti, Kurir and Informer. Nothing about it was hidden.

The former government, he wrote, had extradited General Mladić to the Hague Tribunal and had celebrated handing over “officers who defended the Serbian people” to foreigners to be judged. Those who had refused Serbia’s request to bring him home to die had behaved in an “anti-civilisational” way. Those who question Mladić’s life and work never speak of Naser Orić. Mladić would be buried in Serbia “as befits”, if the family so wished. The statement ends on the army: Serbia wants peace, the Serbian people want dialogue, and a strong Serbian army guarantees stability.

In May 2011 Aleksandar Vučić read out the Progressive Party’s statement on the arrest: Serbia had “undisputed and unambiguous international obligations and rights, which it took on itself by passing laws in the National Assembly”, and arresting General Mladić was among them. Snežana Malović, the justice minister of the day, said the transfer fulfilled Serbia’s international and moral obligation. That is the act Vučević now calls a betrayal.

On 28 June 2001, the evening of the day Zoran Đinđić’s government sent Slobodan Milošević to The Hague, Vučić, then a Radical Party vice-president, addressed the protest in Belgrade. He had never dreamed, he said, of living to see a Vidovdan on which “Serbian criminals began handing over their own people”; the transfer had been done on the orders of the American ambassador, William Montgomery. Danas reported the crowd’s chant that evening: “We will kill Đinđić.”

In November 2001 the state’s Special Operations Unit mutinied over further Hague transfers. In March 2003 Đinđić was shot dead outside the government building. The organiser was Milorad Ulemek, the unit’s former commander; the gunman, Zvezdan Jovanović, its former deputy commander. Nobody has established that the Milošević transfer caused the murder, and nothing here claims it did. Đinđić was dismantling the security and criminal inheritance of the state he had taken over, and the men who killed him came from inside it. NATO’s ambassadors described him the next day as a reformer with the courage to make the difficult changes required to bring Serbia into the Euro-Atlantic community; his murder, they said, was an assault on those working for the future rather than living in the past.

Vučić in 2001: handing Milošević to The Hague was Serbian criminals surrendering their own. Vučić in 2011: arresting Mladić was an obligation Serbia had taken on itself. Vučević in 2026: handing Mladić over was a betrayal of officers who defended the Serbian people. The system has come home. The fifteen years in between look less like a conversion than an adjustment to a Europe that could still impose a price.

Everything that followed had already been announced in that paragraph. Six members of the Serbian Army carried the coffin off the aircraft on 3 September, draped in two flags, with Serbia’s justice minister, Nenad Vujić, on the apron. The Gendarmerie saluted the convoy on the motorway. The commemoration was held at the Army House on the 5th; the opelo and the burial at Topčider followed on the 7th. Each element was afterwards explained separately as logistics, protocol, private attendance or respect for a former officer. Vučević had already supplied the single explanation: a wronged Serbian general, brought home as befits. The burial was that position made visible, ten days after it was published, and the position is the one Vučić held in 2001. In 2001 part of the armed apparatus rebelled against the Hague policy. In 2026 soldiers carried Mladić’s coffin.

A Commission spokesperson said on the 28th that glorification of war criminals has no place in the Union or its candidates. Marta Kos, the enlargement commissioner, repeated the warning at Bled. On 4 September, the day after the coffin was received at the airport, she cancelled her visit to Serbia scheduled for the 9th: the glorification surrounding Mladić’s death, she wrote, was incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built. Vučić called the explanation “extremely short, but stupid, as usual.” The presidents of the Commission and the European Council posted on the 8th.

At noon on the 9th Vučić dissolved the National Assembly and called elections for 25 October. Hours later he was at the Élysée. It was the day Kos had been due in Belgrade. Emmanuel Macron received him before the dinner he gave for the heads of state attending his International Space Summit; Vučić posted a photograph of the two men shaking hands, with the line that every meeting confirms mutual respect and a strong partnership. The bilateral came after dinner. By Vučić’s own account to reporters that night, it ran an hour and twenty minutes; he said Macron’s other conversations had lasted around fifteen. They discussed Europe and the world, Serbia’s European path, the region and the dialogue with Pristina. Vučić said the two had become friends over the years, described the conversation as emotional, and said they had further strengthened the strategic partnership.

Vučević’s statement had been on the wires for twelve days, and nobody with a desk in Belgrade or Paris needed a source to find it. Kos had cancelled Belgrade over the glorification surrounding Mladić.

What did Macron say by receiving him? That Vučević’s position carried no price in Paris. Serbia’s ruling party could again call the Hague handovers a betrayal, the state could bury Mladić with the army’s hands on the coffin, its president could call an election, and that same evening spend eighty minutes at the Élysée discussing Serbia’s European future. Belgrade did not have to guess whether Europe’s warning carried a cost. Kos had shown that Europe could impose one. Five days later Macron showed how little of it Belgrade had to carry.

The insult to the victims is obvious. So is the damage to the authority of a court the Security Council created. Inside Serbia, there was another lesson. Đinđić made the choice Europe asked Serbia to make and became, in Europe’s own telling, the symbol of Serbia’s break with the past. And was killed for it. Tadić continued it and lost power. Vučić opposed it in 2001, accommodated it in 2011, and has built a system whose ruling party repudiates it again. The students who have filled Serbia’s streets since the Novi Sad canopy fell have asked Europe, for almost two years, whether it means what it says.

Macron received that system in Paris two days after it buried Mladić. Brussels has a choice to make.

Drizan Shala is a security researcher and doctoral candidate at the University of Sarajevo. He writes on defense, private security, and the security architecture of the Western Balkans.