BRUSSELS — Serbia's new president on Thursday tried to assure worried European leaders that he has shifted from his earlier extreme anti-Western stance, saying his country hopes to receive EU approval later this year to open accession talks with the bloc.
Tomislav Nikolic, a former ultranationalist who says he has left behind his far-right views, has courted controversy since his election last month, questioning whether the Bosnian Serb killings of 8,000 Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre constitutes genocide and claiming that Vukovar, a Croatian town destroyed by Serb forces in 1991, is a Serbian city.
EU officials said they would warn Nikolic to tone down his nationalist statements if he wishes to see his nation progress toward membership in the bloc.
After a meeting with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton during his first visit to Brussels, Nikolic vowed that "there is no better future for Serbia than membership in the union."
During the 1990s Balkan wars, Nikolic was the deputy leader of the extremist Serbian Radical Party, which was even more hardline than Serbian autocrat Slobodan Milosevic. Nikolic’s gradual transformation started after Milosevic was ousted in 2000 and he has shown recent signs of conciliation, expressing support for the previous government’s quest for EU membership.
During his inauguration ceremony on Monday, Nikolic pledged to press on with pro-EU policies, declaring that "Serbia’s road to the EU is the road to the future."
"Despite our problems with forming a government, we will do everything possible to receive EU approval before the end of the year to open accession negotiations," Nikolic said after meeting Ashton.
In March, the EU made Serbia an official candidate for membership — a key step on the road to full membership. A candidate nation must then be invited to open formal accession talks, which normally drag on for years.
Nikolic is also meeting with Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Two officials said that EU leaders urged Nikolic to quickly form a government that would resume talks on normalizing ties with its former province of Kosovo. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of standing rules.
Neither Nikolic’s Serbian Progressive Party nor the second place Democrats won enough votes in Serbia’s parliamentary elections to form a government alone and both are trying to lure the Socialists to form a coalition government.
Ivan Dacic, the leader of the Socialists, said Thursday that Russia is urging him to hammer out a coalition with the nationalists and ditch his alliance with the Democrats. Dacic said he was under similar pressure four years ago when Washington urged him to join a coalition with the Democrats.
"What do you think there are no pressures from the other side?" Dacic, Milosevic’s wartime spokesman, asked reporters.
Serbia spent much of the 1990s ostracized and isolated from the EU after Milosevic started wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia to stop the war in Kosovo, forcing Serbia to relinquish control there. Kosovo declared independence in 2008.
Serbia’s leaders insist that Belgrade will never recognize Kosovo’s secession, even though it is ready to continue talks with its former province for the sake of further EU integration.
