The arrest of Radovan Karadzic is a reminder of how little Europe did to prevent "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian Muslims, writes Tony Kinsella.
SERBIA'S ARREST of Radovan Karadzic heightens many of our perceptions and fears. Serbian desire to join the European Union doubtless boosted the efforts of its security services, another success for EU soft power.
The reasons for his arrest remind us, however, of our past collective failures and the lessons we should have learned from them. The bloody horrors of the former Yugoslavia's wars of disintegration, presented yet another demonstration of the demons scattered across our histories, and a warning for the future.
A mere 90 years ago what briefly (1918-2003) became Yugoslavia was divided between the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires. If the Serbo-Croat language spanned most of the country, political and religious affiliations divided it. The Croats and Slovenes, as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, were mainly Catholic, the Ottoman Bosnians Muslim, while the Serbs were Orthodox. Serbian use of the Cyrillic alphabet added another complexity.
Some, such as Karadzic, maintain that these divisions reflect real ethnic differences. Others argue that many of the differences between inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia have more to do with history than ethnicity.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the former Yugoslavia's most celebrated novel, The Bridge on the Drina, has an artefact as its central character. The book follows the inhabitants of Visegrad through the lifespan of the bridge from its Ottoman construction in 1566 to its Austrian destruction in 1914. The book won its author, Ivo Andric, the Nobel prize for literature in 1961.
We on our small island are probably better placed than most to appreciate the passions minor ethnic distinctions can release. Leaders such as Slobodan Milosevic and later Radovan Karadzic rose to power by fanning the flames of hatred, ably assisted by their Croatian and to a lesser extent, Bosnian counterparts.
A patchwork of wars, sieges and atrocities scarred the country from 1991-1995. Somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 people died and millions had to flee their homes.
Radovan Karadzic, as leader of the Bosnian Serbs, gave us the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe the use of massacres, pillage and mass rapes to drive non-Serbs from their homes.
The Bosnian Serbs added a particularly misogynist wrinkle to their crimes through the systematic and repeated rape of Bosnian Muslim women with the intention of impregnating them.
The resulting children would be "pure" Serbs, their genetic make up being exclusively determined by their fathers - as though their mothers simply did not exist.
The outside world strove initially to keep Yugoslavia together, then to assist in its peaceful separation into component states. When war engulfed it, the emphasis switched to peace negotiations and humanitarian assistance. Serbian leaders repeatedly agreed to ceasefires they had not the slightest intention of respecting.
The conflicts presented the world with a conundrum. In the totally autonomous Westphalian nation state system so beloved of some opponents to the Lisbon Treaty, the rest of the planet was formally powerless. The then Yugoslavia was, initially, the recognised nation state, and its wars, however ghastly, posed no external threat to other UN members. Under international law, there was nothing the international community could do.
We eventually sent far too few peacekeepers into a zone where there was no peace to keep. They were only authorised to use force in self-defence, hence the pictures of blue-helmeted troops standing aside as Serb forces pillaged humanitarian aid convoys.
In June 1992 Bernard Kouchner, then French minister for humanitarian actions, flew into a besieged Sarajevo with the late president Mitterand. Mitterand's courageous presence was enough to force the Serbs to allow a humanitarian airlift.
The forces besieging Sarajevo were technically militia from the unrecognised Serbian Republic of Bosnia - even if most of their hardware and many of their units came from the defunct Yugoslav army.
The armies of the Nato states had been developed and deployed to counter an eventual Soviet invasion, not to police a disintegrating Yugoslavia.
There were no multinational units, so each country would have to accept responsibility for any aggressive action by its troops. Individual soldiers would be open to prosecution for murder were they to kill anybody in the war-torn country since their countries were not at war with that state.
Slowly, against a growing public clamour for action, the world began to feel its way forward into dealing with this new situation. The UN Security Council, our planet's highest political authority and only universal moral one, designated eight safe areas in Bosnia. We, the entire world, promised Bosnian civilians safety within those enclaves, but we failed to deliver.
Our most infamous failure was Srebrenica where the UN through a Japanese official, Nato through a French general and a few hundred lightly-armed Dutch troops, lots of dithering and poorly established lines of command and communication allowed Serbian forces to massacre more than 8,000 Bosnian men and boys.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established in 1993. Radovan Karadzic is expected to be extradited in the coming days and will stand trial there.
He and the actions over which he presided would have been entirely familiar to our ancestors.
Cato always addressed the Roman senate by calling for the destruction of Carthage. Cato did, however, die in 149BC.
The Yugoslav wars demonstrated the need for systems which transcend the classic nation state model.
The 27 member states of the EU have created security structures, including 12 unfortunately-named "battle groups", one of which includes 850 Irish troops.
It was depressing to witness, a mere 13 years after Srebrenica, intelligent, motivated, even high-minded Irish campaigners working to defeat the proposed Lisbon structures our world so desperately needs to prevent future reminders of our bloody past.