THE ARREST yesterday of Ratko Mladic is a very welcome development for the European Union, for Serbia and for the cause of international justice. It is the latest stage in Serbia’s long and, at times, painful but ultimately liberating march from the dark and bloody years of the 1990s, and from the international opprobrium and isolation that followed. And it demonstrates that when international institutions show tenacity and work in concert, results, however long coming, are possible.
Ratko Mladic was part of an ethnic-Serb triumvirate that, with some assistance from Croat leaders with whom they made common cause, plunged Bosnia into civil war in the 1990s. The carnage and depraved butchery of the conflict was of a quality not seen in Europe since the end of the second World War and often appeared like something from the Middle Ages. Estimates vary but more than 100,000 people were killed. Mladic was commander of the Bosnian Serb Army that besieged and shelled the capital, Sarajevo, as well as a host of other towns in the Drina river valley in eastern Bosnia. It was also the army that overran Srebrenica and in the ensuing slaughter, an estimated 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in the single worst incident of genocide in Europe since the Holocaust. Mladic’s accomplice in Bosnia’s political leadership was Radovan Karadzic, now on trial in The Hague for war crimes. And their protector and sponsor in almost all that they did was Yugoslav president and Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic, who died in March 2006 while on trial in The Hague.
So much for the past.
Serbia has come a long way since the 1999 Nato bombing that forced Milosevic to cease his ethnic cleansing activities in Kosovo and which ultimately led to his downfall the following year. Since then, the forces of Serbian democracy have fought extreme Serbian nationalism. Serbian democrats, with strong encouragement from the European Union holding out the prospect of EU membership, have gained the upper hand and appear reasonably well entrenched in Belgrade. It is no coincidence, surely, that Mladic’s arrest came on foot of a leaked UN report in which The Hague war crimes tribunal chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz asserted Belgrade was nonetheless refusing to co-operate in the search for him. And within hours of his arrest, Baroness Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, was in Belgrade for a scheduled visit to discuss Serbia’s desire for EU membership. Such talks were not destined to succeed while Mladic remained at large amid suspicions his freedom was facilitated by friends in high places.
The EU must now accelerate its engagement with the Serbian government, encouraging it further into the mainstream European family, by enacting more reforms and cementing fully its disengagement from its extreme nationalist and murderous past. Serbia’s president, Boris Tadic, was not exaggerating yesterday when he said Mladic’s arrest “removes a heavy burden from Serbia and closes a page of our unfortunate history”.