Serbian parliament ratifies SAA

09/09/2008

Serbia took an important step on its path to EU accession Tuesday, when its parliament ratified a key pre-membership accord with the Union. A senior Brussels official urged the 27-nation bloc to enact an interim trade agreement with Belgrade.

(AFP, Reuters, DPA, BBC, B92 - 09/09/08; AFP, DPA, HINA, Beta, B92 - 08/09/08; Bloomberg - 06/09/08)

The Stabilisation and Association Agreement was backed by 139 deputies, with 26 voting against it. [Getty Images]

The Serbian parliament on Tuesday (September 9th) ratified the country's Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with the EU, a major step towards eventual membership in the 27-nation bloc, which the Balkan nation hopes to achieve by 2014.

The key accord was backed by 139 of the lawmakers in the 250-seat assembly. Only 26 representatives of Vojislav Kostunica's Democratic Party of Serbia and Velimir Ilic's New Serbia voted against the move. Members of the main opposition Serbian Radical Party (SRS), which effectively split Monday over the SAA, abstained from voting, according to Serbian media reports.

The agreement now awaits ratification by all 27 EU-member states. The Netherlands indicated last week that it might block EU efforts to speed up Serbia's accession until Belgrade has demonstrated full co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The Hague is still pursuing two war crimes fugitives from the 1990s Balkan conflicts: former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic and former Croatian Serb political leader Goran Hadzic.

"Full co-operation does mean the arrests of those who are still not put before the tribunal," Bloomberg news agency quoted Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen as saying in an interview Saturday.

Shortly after news of the SAA's endorsement Tuesday, Serbian media also quoted EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn as urging the EU to enact an interim trade agreement with Belgrade. The Union proposed the deal earlier this year to facilitate Serbia's access to pre-accession funds.

"We've received evidence that Serbia has reached a satisfactory level of co-operation with The Hague tribunal," Belgrade-based B92 quoted Rehn as saying in an interview with Novi Sad daily Dnevnik.

Tuesday's developments followed a series of events that triggered the SRS's split.

Tomislav Nikolic, the party's acting leader since early 2003, resigned last Friday, a day after saying the Radicals would support the SAA. His advocacy of the SAA had angered SRS leader Vojislav Seselj, who is currently on trial at the ICTY, as he immediately ordered the party from his jail cell to vote against ratifying the SAA. Nikolic resigned to protest Seselj's order, saying, "I can take anything, but not this."

Nikolic, who also stepped down as chairman of the party's 77-member parliamentary group -- the single biggest in the assembly -- said on Monday he was forming his own faction. Ten other Radical lawmakers joined the new grouping, called "Forward Serbia".

While members of both his faction and the core SRS group abstained in the vote on the SAA, they did support a key energy co-operation deal with Russia, which passed on Tuesday by a vote of 214-22.