'A new brotherhood and unity'

That's how the Belgrade daily 'Press', using the Communist Yugoslav-era motto of ethnic cooperation, in describing the success of the official visit by Croatia's president Ivo Josipović to Serbia. Yesterday he was walking rather casually with Serbian president Boris Tadić down the streets of Belgrade, where the Serbian and Croatian flags were hanging from Communist-era flagpoles side by side without much disgust from the locals. It makes you think for what the hell were they fighting about 15 years ago? It's a great sign of how the madness of the war years have passed and that ex-Yugoslavia is moving forward by going backwards to Yugoslavia (of sorts). Josipović even met with Serbs who were ethnically cleansed from the former breakaway region of Serbian Krajina, which too is a good sign, and possibly could assist in bringing back refugees to their place of origin. The Serbian president also handed to his Croatian counterpart an icon that had been looted by Serb soldiers during the wars of the early 1990s. Josipović also made a visit to the northern Serbian city of Subotica where a quarter of the population is Croatian.

There, peace in the Balkans can be done and without help from the EU. The fact that the way the Balkans has slowly but surely removed the anomosities of the 90s has been through the common aspects they share - music, television, food and drink. Serbian singers regularly perform in Croatia and vice-versa, while Croatian soap operas such as Dolina sunca (Sun Valley) have been successfully winning the ratings up against stiff Turkish competition. This proves that the Western stereotype of 'centuries-old ethnic hatred' in the Balkans just really isn't so.