President Tadic of Serbia stopped by our offices recently to outline his vision for his country’s future – moving toward both NATO and European Union membership and away from her communist and nationalist past. This affable democrat, who was elected president in 2004, struck us as the West’s best hope for Serbia to rejoin the community of free nations.

The president acknowledged that he has a tough journey ahead. While five years have passed since Slobodan Milosevic was removed from power – he’s now in the dock at The Hague – Serbia has yet to introduce the economic, political, and institutional reforms necessary for a free-market and democratic society to exist. The difficulty lies in reforming powerful institutional structures – such as the military and intelligence – opposed to change. A research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Vance Serchuk, told The New York Sun that “Communism and communist structures, less the ideology than the power structures,” remain in place. This is one of the stumbling blocks in Serbia’s quest to join NATO.

Mr. Serchuk told the Sun that as Serbia still has a “semi-criminalized military,” America and others “can’t do intelligence sharing” that NATO membership entails. Just how powerful these forces are was seen in 2003 when a colleague of Mr. Tadic, Prime Minister Djindjic, a fellow reformer, was assassinated by a gang alleged to have ties to the intelligence services.

Mr. Tadic’s election in 2004, which surprised the pundits who predicted a nationalist would win, is a sign of whose side the Serbian people are taking. Mr. Serchuk says that there is “widespread desire in Serbia to rejoin the trans-Atlantic community” and that Mr. Tadic has “for the moment eclipsed” those opposed to reform. One impetus is the allure of the European Union. The same has been true for other previously communist states. Mr. Tadic told the Sun he sees Europe as the key to Serbia’s prosperity.

One precondition for membership in both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is for it to track-down and handover war criminals that remain at large. The “Butcher of Srebrenica,” Ratko Mladic, responsible for the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims, is believed to be hiding somewhere in Serbia. The president told the Sun he is doing everything he can to track down these wanted men and is “cooperating with neighbors on war crimes.”

Another issue is the future of Kosovo. Mr. Tadic told the Sun that Kosovo is “our Jerusalem” and “the origin of our country.” The most important monasteries of the Serbian Orthodox Church, for example, are there. The president reiterated to the Sun a plan of “more than autonomy, less than independence” for Kosovo. This would give Kosovo’s Albanians self-government, while Serbia would retain overall sovereignty.

Mr. Tadic’s approach is a step forward from the unconditional sovereignty other Serbian leaders have demanded, but its unlikely to be accepted by the 90% Albanian population of Kosovo. The Serb brutality of the 1990s alienated them so much that in the end, Mr. Serchuk told the Sun, Kosovo “will be independent.” What the West can do, Mr. Serchuk says, is help Serbia realize it has a “100 pound weight tied round its head” and “get Kosovo off the table so it can get to the real issues” of reform in Serbia.

An aide to the president told us after our meeting with the president that Saudi money is flowing into Kosovo under the guise of humanitarian aid. The money is used to build mosques to espouse the Saudi radical version of Islam, Wahhabism. Mr. Serchuk told the Sun that in a recent visit to Kosovo he’d seen a new mosque that had been financed by Saudi money. America could press for greater oversight of humanitarian aid flowing in.

Ultimately the role of the West is to “help the Serbs help themselves,” Mr. Serchuk told the Sun, and he believes Mr. Tadic is the best man for this job, being both “ideologically on the right side of history, and clear-headed and clear-minded” of what needs to be done. It looks like America and her European allies would do well to help Mr. Tadic in, what can only be described as, a monumental task.