Wiki Leaks

The cables, sent from the US embassies in Belgrade and Pristina between the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, show that American diplomats feared that European "vacillation and weakness" would allow Serbs to push for the partition of Kosovo, which could trigger ethnic violence.

According to the dispatches, released by the whistblowers' Web site Wikileaks, senior Serbian officials have been indirectly pushing for the partition of Kosovo, claiming that while they may never again govern Kosovo, the government in Pristina will never gain full control of the territory.

Tadic's foreign policy adviser Jovan Ratkovic told the US ambassador Mary Warlick in February that Kosovo Serbs in north Kosovo would never accept Kosovo Albanian government.

According to Ratkovic, the US and the EU were considering "military intervention" to forcibly incorporate northern Kosovo.

Ratkovic, who laid out a scenario tantamount to partition to Robert Cooper, Britain's EU troubleshooter on the Balkans and Iran, explicitly told Cooper that "while Belgrade would need to accept that it would not govern Kosovo again, Kosovo would have to come to the realization that it would not effectively be able to extend its governance north of the Ibar river."

The search for Mladic

Cables sent from the US embassy in Belgrade in 2006 reveal American impatience with Serbia's very limited efforts to track down former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague for war crimes.

American officials noted that they had provided the Serbian government with 11 recommendations designed to advance the Mladic hunt but had had little luck pushing them through. 

"Due primarily to the resistance of Prime Minister Kostunica himself, the government has not carried out in full a single one of our recommendations."

The situation does appear to improve however, after the new Serbian government led by President Tadic's Democratic Party took office in 2008. A cable from May 2009 says that Serbia is doing as much as it can to locate and arrest Mladic.

"The current government clearly wants to find Mladic, a prerequisite for moving ahead with EU accession," the dispatch reads, although a Spanish diplomat whose remarks were conveyed in a 2008 cable didn't agree: “Serbia is not cooperating at all with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and knows perfectly well where Mladic is."

Other diplomats continued to express their concern over the Mladic situation. In a dispatch from November 2009, published in part by the NY Times, Austrian diplomat Valentin Inzko says that Mladic "was hiding in Belgrade with a new identity, perhaps with help from a security firm acting as a support network."

He also voiced fear over what he felt was waning American pressure on Belgrade, worrying that America was “abandoning the Mladic case.”

The leaked communication also point to a possible Russian connection to the Mladic case. Presidential advisor Miki Rakic told American diplomats in August 2009 that "Russia has not been forthcoming on Serbia’s requests for assistance in locating Hague indictee Ratko Mladic".

He noted that he had requested information about specific contacts between Mladic associates and Russian diplomats, as well as phone calls and trips to Russia by Mladic associates, to a number of Russian officials and was awaiting their reponse.