Expedient justice

IT’S difficult when you see photographs of wanted men looking old and gaunt to remember the brutal leaders they once were. Shrunken and frail, the Ratko Mladic captured in Serbia last week bore little resemblance to the bull-necked Bosnian Serb general, famous for telling soldiers shelling the city of Sarajevo: “Scorch their brains.” But one only has to revisit the gruesome images of the pits piled high with the bodies of Bosnian Muslims massacred at Srebrenica to be reminded of the heinous nature of the crimes he is said to have committed.

Mladic is almost certainly the man responsible for the worst act of ethnic cleansing on European soil since the Holocaust. So his arrest, by Serbian secret police in the village of Lazarevo last week, should be cause for, if not euphoria, then at least a sense of satisfaction over a job well done.

Instead, Serbian President Boris Tadic’s announcement – made at a self-congratulatory press conference in Belgrade – was met with a downbeat response from atrocity survivors and a degree of unease elsewhere. After three years of watching Radovan Karadzic drag out his trial at The Hague, the Bosnian Muslims, who danced on the streets when the former Bosnian Serb president was arrested, have lost faith in the ability of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to deliver justice.

Elsewhere, spirits have been dampened by a sense that the timing of Mladic’s arrest (it came as an ICTY report highlighting Tadic’s lack of co-operation over the war criminal threatened to halt talks over accession to the EU) and the ease with which it was carried out are evidence of his previous complicity.

In his early years on the run, Mladic was often seen out and about in Serbia, albeit with a posse of bodyguards. He went to his son’s wedding, tended his daughter Ana’s grave and even, it is said, popped back to Bosnia Herzegovina now and again. A large number of Serbs must have known where he was, but they did nothing.

In acting now, Tadic was clearly motivated not by any moral imperative, but by the prospect of billions of pounds of grant aid. That and his desire to hold on to power in the 2012 election. The tacit question casting a shadow over the affair seemed to be: “Do we really want a country run by such an opportunist to join the EU”?

Personally, I don’t really understand all the hand-wringing. Yes, Serbia has probably been harbouring Mladic, in the same way Pakistan was harbouring bin Laden. Yes, it only acted when the political pressure was ramped up. But isn’t that how every country moves on from conflict? In faltering baby steps, driven by a combination of carrot and stick?

Would the Northern Ireland peace deal have been signed without the prisoner release scheme? Would apartheid have ended without sanctions? Every day, we have to accept unpalatable compromises; to watch our leaders shake hands with those whose past actions we abhor.

The fact Tadic responded to the threat proves he is at last serious about joining the EU. Far from having opprobrium heaped upon him, he deserves a degree of credit for sticking to his guns in the face of opposition from many ordinary Serbians, who see Mladic not as the Balkan Butcher, but as a war hero. Had he pushed too hard, too soon he might have provoked a nationalist backlash, leading to the toppling of his government.

There may be downsides to Serbia’s desire to join the EU – can an institution already burdened with economic basket cases like Greece cope with another drain on its resources? – but if the former Yugoslav states could be brought under one, broad umbrella, surely ethnic tensions in the region would be eased.

All this is still a long way off, of course. Though failing to arrest Mladic would have prevented accession to the EU, capturing him now does not give Serbia a free pass. Before its bid could be considered there is the small matter of Kosovo to resolve: Serbia refuses to acknowledge its independence, although most EU countries treat it as a sovereign state. A softening on this issue will be harder for Tadic to sell to voters than the capture of Mladic.

In the meantime, we should just be glad that the general who dispensed sweets and reassurances to Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica shortly before giving the order for their slaughter is finally to be sent for trial. Having been declared fit for extradition by a judge in Serbia, it shouldn’t be long before he appears before a judge in The Hague to enter his plea on 11 charges, including double genocide and crimes against humanity.

Though nothing will erase the memory of the Srebrenica massacre or the siege of Sarajevo, the ensuing hearing should bring some acknowledgement and closure to the families of the almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslims who lost their lives.

Let’s just hope the wheels of justice turn more speedily for Mladic than they have for Karadzic and that – despite his frail appearance – he lives long enough to pay some kind of penalty for his orgy of ethnic violence.