AFTER 11 years on the run, Radovan Karadzic is finally behind bars. The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs, indicted for genocide for his leading role in the vicious war that tore apart his country from 1992-5, was arrested by Serbian security forces in a suburb of Belgrade.
The news was greeted with celebrations on the streets of Sarajevo, the city that Karadzic’s forces submitted to a brutal siege for 43 months, as well as in Western capitals that have pressed hard for his arrest. It will come as a relief to the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, which must have almost given up hope of netting its two remaining big fish, Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, and had been shaken by the shambolic trial of Slobodan Milosevic, cut short by the former Serbian president’s death in custody.
Karadzic’s arrest may today seem little more than a fascinating postscript to an old news story, a fugitive finally arrested after more than a decade on the run, hiding in wild mountains and remote monasteries before finally ending up in a suburb of Belgrade, practising alternative medicine under heavy disguise in a script worthy of a thriller.
For Serbia, however, it marks a major break with its nationalist past, one few were expecting despite the recent election of a pro-Western government, keen on hitching a ride to the EU. The election of Boris Tadic was, after all, razor thin, and he was only able to form a government with the help of the late Slobodan Milosevic’s Socialist Party.
And while the fall of Milosevic eight years ago saw the overthrow of a man who used nationalism in his ruthless lust for power, Karadzic was a symbol of the nationalist claptrap that set the region alight, the epic poet with his unruly mop of grey hair, a man who incarnated a Serbian nationalism of saints and warriors fighting for survival since the middle ages.
To Europe, it draws a line on the most traumatic conflict since the Second World War, opening the way to Serbia’s accession to the EU, hand-in-hand with its former enemies. At the same time, the slow but systematic haul of war criminals from the former Yugoslavia appeases the conscience of a continent that was shamed and paralysed as a murderously brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing was unleashed in its own back yard.
Today, the tribunal’s methodical, orderly procedures provide a salutary contrast to the brutal victors’ justice delivered by the Americans in Iraq. Fifteen years ago, the international community may have failed miserably in the Balkans, but as the last criminals of those wars are brought to justice, their fate will serve as a warning to rogue presidents and warlords across the world.
