Dutch ready to give some ground on Serbia EU ties

By Emma Thomasson

THE HAGUE, April 24 (Reuters) - The Netherlands is ready to allow the European Union to make a gesture to Serbia ahead of a May 11 election but is insistent Belgrade must deliver war criminals to The Hague, a Dutch minister said on Thursday.

"It is time to promote trust in Europe among Serbian voters," Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen told a Dutch parliamentary committee ahead of a meeting of his EU counterparts next Tuesday in Luxembourg.

"We want to make clear that we have nothing against Serbia."

The vast majority of EU states want to sign a Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) with Belgrade that would put it on the road to eventual EU membership in the hope that it would boost Serb moderates in the election next month.

But the Netherlands, backed by Belgium, has insisted that Serbia must first show it is serious about bringing war crimes fugitives before a U.N. tribunal in The Hague.

"I want to look for a creative solution to this dilemma," Verhagen said, adding possible gestures to Belgrade could include visa liberalisation and trade access for Serbian products.

The Netherlands has said former Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic must be delivered to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face genocide charges before the SAA is signed.

Verhagen said Mladic would never be arrested if anti-Europe forces came to power in Belgrade and tensions could increase over Kosovo, which justified some EU concessions now.



ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE

While parliamentarians from the ruling Dutch parties supported some move towards Belgrade, opposition politicians said the Netherlands should stick to its tough stance, limiting Verhagen's room for manoeuvre next week.

"Serbia should not be rewarded for bad behaviour," said Han ten Broeke from the VVD liberals, adding there was no guarantee that concessions would bring moderates to power or Mladic to The Hague.

Labour parliamentarian Luuk Blom said: "Other countries must realise that the position of the Netherlands is different due to our history and we want our friend Mladic here."

Mladic, along with Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, is accused of genocide for the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 after Dutch peacekeepers guarding the area were forced to abandon the enclave.

The Dutch government led by Wim Kok resigned in 2002 after a report on the massacre blamed politicians for sending the Dutch U.N. troops on an impossible mission.

Alfred Pijpers, an analyst at the Clingendael Institute, said there was broad support for the government's position.

"Srebrenica caused deep trauma in Dutch society and politics," he said. "We feel personally as a nation that we have been betrayed and attacked by Mladic and Karadzic."

"We feel it is a kind of correction to what went wrong in the past that they come to the Hague before any concessions."

Serbia's fragile government coalition of nationalists and pro-Western liberals collapsed in March over whether the country should pursue closer ties with the EU despite the bloc's support for Kosovo's declaration of independence in February.