Serbia FM Jeremic 'Not the Modern Face of Belgrade'

French diplomatic adviser Jean-David Levitte told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon during his visit to Paris in September 2009 that Jeremic “is doing nothing to encourage Serb return or participation in Kosovo's government.”

”Levitte no longer meets with him and does not consider him to be the "modern face of Belgrade" that he purports to be,” the memo reads.

The French political advisor accuses Jeremic of making big promises every time he comes to Paris which he doesn't follow through on.

The secret memo is part of some 250,000 US embassy cables sent between 1996 and 2010 that the whistleblowers' Web site WikiLeaks obtained and is gradually releasing.

In the dispatch, US diplomats note that Levitte also complained of diplomatic problems EULEX mission had with the Kosovo government and public after signing two technical protocols with Serbia.

“Gordon stated that the Kosovars will have to accept the protocols but that it should be clearly explained that these are technical agreements that have no impact on Kosovo's independent status,” the memo reads.

In another cable from November 2009, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's foreign policy advisor Christoph Heusgen reveals that Serbia’s Tadic, who claims to be tough on Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, “needed to be tougher.”  

Heusgen expressed pessimism about whether it would ever be possible to turn Bosnia into a "working state," but said “it was important to keep trying.”

There are thousands of documents from the former Yugoslavia among the more than 250,000 leaked United States embassy cables which WikiLeaks started publishing on Sunday.

London daily the Guardian, one of several media outlets who were given the cables, wrote that the secret memos also reveal information on Serbian war crimes indictees, including “why an alleged major Serbian war criminal has never been caught”, but no cables on this topic have yet been published.

According to German magazine Der Spiegel, the leaked cables include 994 from Belgrade, 1,686 from Zagreb, 869 from Sarajevo, 668 from Pristina, 522 from Skopje and 164 from Podgorica.