THE ARREST of Radovan Karadzic in Belgrade on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Bosnia after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1992-5 continues the politics of atrocity on which that horrible war was based.
Barely two weeks after a new coalition government was formed in Serbia with a brief to secure its passage towards membership of the European Union Karadzic was discovered working as a doctor in the city. Clearly Serb intelligence forces have waited for the political will to be put in place before moving against him.Handing him over to the special court in The Hague will fulfil one of the central conditions set out by EU foreign ministers who yesterday enthusiastically welcomed the arrest in Brussels.
The fundamental purpose of such an evolution must be to ensure atrocities like these are never again made an instrument of politics in the Balkans or elsewhere in Europe. Radovan Karadzic typified those political methods during the war in Bosnia. As political leader of the Bosnian Serbs he directed the campaign of ethnic cleansing which removed one million Muslims and Croats from the towns and villages they had lived in for centuries as integrated minorities, killing up to 200,000 people and raping an estimated 20,000 women. Ten thousand died in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and in the most notorious incident of the whole war 8,000 Muslim Bosnians were killed at Srebrenica by troops loyal to Karadzic.
His aim, together with his military commander Ratko Mladic (who is still on the run) was to clear Bosnian and Croatian areas with Serb majorities of their other inhabitants and eventually to merge them with greater Serbia, led by the major architect of the ex-Yugoslav wars, Slobodan Milosevic. After prolonged prevarication by western powers, during which all three men were indulged as valid power-brokers, this plan was dropped, Sarajevo was relieved and Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia were recognised as independent states in the 1995 Dayton Accords. By then Karadzic and Mladic had fled, although the wider Balkan conflict continued for another five years in Kosovo, the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia and Montenegro, involving further western intervention.
Karadzic's arrest symbolises a major political change in the Serbian heart of the conflict. The new coalition government formed after general elections in May - an unlikely combination of the pro-EU Democratic Party led by Boris Tadic and Milosevic's successor Socialist Party - seems determined to pursue a path towards eventual EU membership. It is responding to economic and travel incentives offered from Brussels and is convinced this is the better way to secure economic and social development for the country's impoverished 7.5 million people. An alternative path of isolation from the EU and closer relations with Russia, as advocated by the ultranationalist Radikal Party has, happily, less and less appeal. An eventual Balkan EU enlargement is the best way to bring stability to this most troubled part of Europe, recovering from the most destructive war since 1945.