-Caveat Lector-
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The Guardian Saturday August 17, 2002
International
East Europeans torn on the rack by international court row
Ian Traynor
Trapped in the middle of the increasingly rancorous dispute between
the US and the EU about international justice, the countries of
eastern Europe are in a quandary about how to respond to the intense
US pressure to give American citizens immunity from war crimes
prosecutions.
While Washington bullies, Brussels warns. From Estonia on the Baltic
to Albania on the Adriatic, countries' hope of joining both Nato and
the EU appear to be threatened by the row about the new International
Criminal Court in the Hague.
In the Balkans, where the issue of war crimes is politically potent,
and up through central Europe to the Baltic states of the former
Soviet Union, governments are wrestling with a hard dilemma: how to
avoid offending the US and improve their hope of being admitted to
Nato while toeing the west European line as candidate members of the
EU.
Croatia is the latest target of the US campaign: the government in
Zagreb disclosed on Wednesday that it had received a letter from the
US embassy requesting a bilateral pact banning the extradition of
Americans from Croatia to the Hague.
The dilemma is particularly tough in neighbouring Bosnia, the scene of
the worst war crimes in Europe since the Nazis, where 2,500 US
military personnel are helping to keep the peace.
In Serbia the Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, dismissed the US
pressure this week and said there would be no deal. But the prime
minister, Zoran Djindjic, may yet do Washington's bidding.
Together with Iraq, the row about the ICC is perhaps the most serious
of the many issues currently clouding transatlantic relations.
Brussels bluntly warned the east Europeans this week to heed EU advice
and avoid making concessions individually to the Americans before the
EU agrees a common position at the end of the month.
In eastern Europe integration with the west has been a fundamental
foreign policy aim for the past 10 years and they regard membership of
the EU and Nato as the twin pillars of that policy.
But the conflicting pressures on them concerning the ICC show how
estranged the US and Europe are becoming.
The court, brought into being last month, is fiercely opposed by the
Bush administration, even though the UN has agreed to waive any
possible prosecution of Americans for a year. Washington is seeking
individual pacts with the 77 states which have made themselves subject
to the court to make extraditions of Americans to the Hague
impossible.
While Washington wants fast results, Brussels is playing for time.
Reluctant to incur US displeasure, and with one eye on improving its
chance of joining Nato in November, Romania broke rank last week to
become the first European country - the only country bar Israel - to
promise not to extradite Americans to the Hague.
Neighbouring Bulgaria is also extremely wary of alienating the US, and
was the only country to support the Americans during last month's
peacekeeping crisis in Bosnia, when the US threatened to scupper the
Bosnian mission unless it got its way on the ICC.
Romania's decision is now seen to have been a foreign policy blunder,
condemned by Brussels and regretted by the Bucharest. But the Romanian
foreign minister, Mircea Geoana, made it clear that Bucharest was
intimidated Washington's "clear and direct request".
It was unprecedented, he said. "I can't remember anything they put so
much weight or interest into."
In former Yugoslavia, whose atrocity-riddled succession wars in the
1990s helped prompt the court's foundation, and have produced the
first war crimes trial of a former head of state (Slobodan Milosevic),
the US campaign appears to be stalling.
Croatia, which was the first east European state to ratify the ICC
statutes, is defying the US demand. In Washington this week its
president, Stipe Mesic, was characteristically blunt.
"This is not good and it's getting counter-productive," he told a US
radio interviewer. "You have an established democracy fighting for
respect for the law and at the same time demanding its citizens be
exempted for things others have to answer for."
Mr Kostunica, a fierce opponent of the specific war crimes tribunal
for former Yugoslavia in the Hague, although Belgrade has ratified the
new court's statutes, rebuffed the US on Monday.
If the Serbs and Croats continue to defy the US, the Bosnians may
follow. Paradoxically, the three former Yugoslav states, at war with
one another for much of the 90s, may end up united in resisting the
American demand, denounced last week by Human Rights Watch as
"hypocritical bullying".
Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, already Nato members and
leading candidates for the EU, are playing for time. The Poles and the
Czechs are traditionally pro-American and are increasingly resentful
of the terms being dictated by Brussels in the drawn-out negotiations
for EU accession. The Slovakian government had made it plain that it
is reserving judgment on the US request until the EU sets a policy.
Meanwhile the signals from the Baltic are that the Estonians will bow
to the US demand when their prime minister, Siim Kallas, visits the
White House early next month.
Guardian Unlimited � Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
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