How the Israeli-Serbian agreement looks through the lens of the Balkan wars

I enjoyed the look on Aleksandar Vucic’s face when Donald Trump announced that under the new Serbian-Kosovo “normalisation agreement”, Serbia would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.  

As Trump announced that the lads from Belgrade would be moving their ambassador to the city which the US claims is Israel’s unified capital, the former public relations man for dictator Slobodan Milosevic looked at the documents in front of him with puzzlement – and then began flicking over the pages. When Serbia was murdering the Muslims of Bosnia almost three decades ago, you didn’t see this kind of hesitation among Belgrade’s top men.

Milosevic was a war criminal, of course, but Vucic? Never – although during the Bosnian war he did graphically suggest that “for every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims”. He also accompanied one of Serbia’s most frightening militia bosses on a secret jaunt to Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. And spoke of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men – in answer to a question of mine – as a “situation”. But the moment he talked post-war about human rights and how Serbia wished to join the EU, he became the delight of Brussels. Why, the new Serbian president – Vucic, no less – even enlisted the help of Tony Blair (once the bomber of Belgrade) to advise on Serbia’s future policies.

But memories are like sinkholes. Here today, gone tomorrow. Just as the invader of Iraq became a saintly inspiration for human rights, the dodgy information minister for the most unholy of Balkan tyrants turned into a likeable, democratic, pro-EU president. Israel, whose current prime minister – no more of this stuff about corruption, please – was delighted last month that Serbia was going to join Kosovo in opening an embassy in Jerusalem.

No mention by the Israeli leader of the SS-style Serbian gangs who destroyed the Muslim towns and villages of Bosnia with the encouragement of Vucic’s former boss. The EU itself – owner of the biggest political memory hole in Europe – was a bit taken aback. Hold on there a second, it said, if Vucic wants Serbia to join the European Union, why was it breaking ranks with its future European partners by trundling its ambassador up to Jerusalem? Didn’t Vucic recall the EU’s insistence on the two-state solution, a capital for Palestinians as well as for Jews in Jerusalem (etc, etc, etc, etc)?

Or – given his look of blank amazement when he heard Trump announce the Serbian embassy’s removal to Jerusalem – did Vucic have the slightest idea what he was doing in the first place?

Quite possibly not. When he came down to Kosovo on 18 June 1998 – with his “baby face, thick lips and quick smile,” I noted unkindly in The Independent at the time – he was the faithful voice of the dictator Milosovic. All that the soon-to-be charged war criminal wanted in Kosovo, Vucic told us, was peace, dialogue and human rights for everyone, including the 90 per cent Muslim Kosovar Albanian population.

Vucic had also been the spokesman for Vojislav Seselj, leader of the Serbian militia which ethnically cleansed much of Bosnia. Seselj, no less, said that his men had graduated to “rusty shoehorns” in putting out Croat eyes. That’s why I asked Vucic about Srebrenica. There was no reason, he replied then, to use comparisons with Bosnia and – here we all held our breath – with “the vocabulary of the situation in Srebrenica”. That word “situation” came from Vucic’s lips, a terrifying expression for the execution of more than 8,000 Muslims into mass graves that followed the 1995 surrender of the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica to the Serb murderers.

Here was Vucic, the information minister, less than three years after the slaughter, palming us off with “the situation”, while lecturing us on civic duty, constitutional rights, patriotism and non-violence. So why should we be surprised to discover that the same tall, rather gangling but smart young man had accompanied the monstrous Vojislav Seselj (under a veil of secrecy and in the company of Iraqi security agents) to Baghdad as a guest of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party? Seselj held a long meeting with Saddam – Iraq was at the time crushed by 10 years of crippling sanctions which were imposed following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait – after landing at Damascus airport in Syria and being escorted by both Syrian and Iraqi escorts to the border post at Wadi Ash Shalan for the overland journey to Baghdad.

Vucic, the former Milosovic minister of information – who knew very well that Saddam had sent telegrams of mutual support to Milosovic at the height of the 1999 Kosovo war when the Serbs, under Nato air attack, were driving 200,000 Muslims out of Kosovo – later became the leader of post-Milosevic Serbia. He now wanted to take Serbia into the EU and was thus loved by our EU mates in Brussels and who was now advised by – no drawing in of breath here, please – Tony Blair. And since Blair has now “advised” the dictator of Uzbekistan and more recently the Egyptian coup leader, Brigadier General President al-Sisi, Vucic is in good company.

A safe pair of hands, then, greeted warmly in Downing Street and Brussels; not just a prodigal son, but a man whose decision to accept a compromise UN resolution on Kosovo – acknowledging a World Court ruling that Kosovo’s independence declaration was legal – was embraced by our Brussels elite as a “major breakthrough”. All of which accelerated Belgrade’s request for membership of the EU. Blessed are the peacemakers. Vucic, of course, was doing all the right things. He ran the Serbian Progressive Party, was heartily loathed by his old friend Seselj – who was cleared of war crimes in Bosnia after eight years of imprisonment at The Hague – and even turned up at the Srebrenica memorial service, where Bill Clinton rashly urged mourners to shake him by the hand. They did not – and he fled the scene.

But this is mere background. The Israelis are not going to worry about Vucic’s past in the Balkan wars. Nor his former friends of disrepute. It’s not difficult, of course, to see why Israelis instinctively regard Serbs with warmth. Serbian partisans saved many Jews from Hitler and, during the Second World War, Serbs shared the fate of many thousands of Jews in one of the Nazi Croatians’ most sadistic concentration camps at a small town called Jasenovac on the Sava river. Readers should look up references to this terrible place of beheadings and torture and be duly appalled.

It’s not just the Second World War that links modern-day Israelis and Serbs. During Kosovo’s struggle for liberation from the Serbs, Ariel Sharon, who was then Israel’s foreign minister, opposed Nato's war in Kosovo, inveighing against “Islamic terror” in the Serbian province. Sound familiar? Sharon had spotted very astutely that Nato had gone to war to separate part of Serbia’s sovereign territory and give it independence on the grounds that a majority of its people – the Muslim Kosovars – wanted a separate state.

“The moment that Israel expresses support [for Nato],” said Sharon, “it's likely to be the next victim. Imagine that one day Arabs in Galilee demand that the region in which they live be recognised as an autonomous area, connected to the Palestinian Authority...” So Sharon, however briefly, became an ally of Milosevic. There could be no Albanian state in Kosovo, according to Sharon, lest the world decides later that the Israeli Palestinian citizens of Israeli Galilee should also wish to secede. Quite apart from the future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza. Well, Kosovo got its independence…

So there will be much for the future Serbian ambassador to Jerusalem to discuss with his Israeli hosts. And the Israelis will also, of course, be able to chat on the same subject to the future Kosovo ambassador to Jerusalem. It should turn into quite a debate.