One of the biggest war criminals of the second half of the 20th Century has been caught—after only 16 years of hiding out in his native Serbia. Ratko Mladic has been arrested by Serb forces & is being held pending extradition to the UN tribunal at The Hague, where his political master, Radovan Karadzic, is currently defending charges of crimes against humanity.
Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, is evidently in very poor health & is probably looking forward to the medical care he’ll get while awaiting trial—care he wouldn’t have had access to in his village hideout.
Mladic was the commander of Serb forces that invaded Bosnia in the 90s following the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Working with Karadzic he crafted & executed a policy that brought us the term “ethnic cleansing”; their goal was to eradicate any non-Serbs in territory the Serbs deemed Serbian. Kind of like a south Slav version of lebensraum. The massacre at Srebrenica was only the largest & most appalling of their crimes.
It was a policy that the entire nation carried out with vigor & relish. In many quarters both Mladic & Karadzic are still considered Serbian heroes, unfairly & falsely vilified by a world that doesn’t understand the rightful place of Serbs & their destiny as a people.
That attitude partly explains why it’s taken so bloody long to take Mladic into custody; the Serbian government didn’t really put a whole lot of effort into the search. Like the Pakistanis being shocked—shocked, I say—to discover Osama Bin Laden living in their midst for years & years, I have no doubt that the Serbs & their government have been well aware of the criminals among them & were just disinclined to grab them up.
It’s only because they want to join the EU, & failing to turn over Mladic is an insurmountable barrier to that goal, that they’ve suddenly discovered where he’s been.
In many ways, the Serbs are like the Germans of 1944-45: they don’t believe they or their government did anything wrong in their quest to subsume formerly Yugoslavian territory into their idea of empire. They’re not at all sorry they went to war; they’re sorry they weren’t successful & they’re sullen that there’ve been some negative consequences.
I’m glad they’ve finally caught the bastard & that he’ll be in the dock in The Hague. Too often it’s only the little fish that are brought to justice. Mladic is a whacking great shark, even if his teeth are rotting & he’s utterly unrepentant, & he should be brought to justice, regardless of the delay.
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