A dark, violent Serbian chapter may be coming to a close with the arrest of Ratko Mladic, allegedly one of the world’s most prominent war criminals. As the BBC is reporting, the 69-year-old Mladic was nabbed in a northern Serbian village, where he had been living under an assumed name. Serbian President Boris Tadic said the process to extradite the former Bosnian Serb army chief, who faces charges for the massacre of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, was underway. The news of Mladic’s arrest brings good news for Serbia overall, as it could help the nation move forward on its desired accession to the European Union, Reuters reports.
Sixteen years after I returned home from the former Yugoslavia, 16 years after the massacre at Srebrenica, Gen. Ratko Mladic had been captured. I’ve written at some length over the years about Mladic. While I never for a minute believed that the Serbian government was knocking itself out attempting to arrest Mladic, not even I could have imagined what was really happening all these years in plain sight.
It turns out that Mladic has, for the past 16 years, been “hiding” openly, primarily in Serbia. This has been common knowledge within the international community…yet the Serbian government claimed it had no knowledge of his whereabouts. The reason I find the protestations of the Serbian government to be so laughable is based on my own experience there. Serbia, a country slightly larger in size than Utah, still has a pervasive and highly competent internal police component. Just as there’s no credible argument for Pakistan not knowing exactly where Osama bin-Laden was and for how long, the Serbian government can’t believably claim to have been ignorant of the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted war criminal. During my time in Serbia, the secret police knew of virtually every move I made. I find it incredible that they wouldn’t have known exactly where Mladic was every single day over the past 16 years.
The truly sad and cynical aspect of the denouement of this saga is that the arrest of Mladic had as much, if not more, to do with Serbia’s desire to join the European Union. Mladic is still viewed as a hero by a significant portion of the Serbian populace. The war in Bosnia was (and remains), for many Serbs, a righteous and just war. While I was in Belgrade, I heard numerous stories of Serbs who spent their weekends in Bosnia “hunting Muslims.” What the rest of the world view as war crimes, (far too) Serbs view as a legitimate struggle for national survival. I’m not certain I truly believed in evil prior to my time in Serbia…but while there I saw it, felt it, and spoke with it…and it’s something I’ll never forget.
If not for Serbia’s desire to enjoy the benefits of EU membership, Ratko Mladic would no doubt still be a free man. Mladic knew this, of course; he made no attempt to go underground, and even his pseudonym, Milorad Komadic, was an anagram of his name. Mladic knew that he had friends in high places and that he was in no immediate danger. He danced at weddings, cried at funerals, and went skiing in Bosnia- which is more than those whose deaths he’s responsible for have been able to do.
My experience in Serbia showed me that most Serbs are good and decent people who want peace and membership in the international community. Yet even among those who profess to reject the virulent strain of nationalism so prevalent in Serbia, there’s a healthy strain of paranoia, a conviction that the world is aligned against Mother Serbia. It’s this paranoia that allowed Ratko Mladic, and before him Radovan Karadzic, to escape justice so openly and for so long.
It’s been said that justice delayed is justice denied. In the case of Serb war criminals like Mladic and Karadzic, it would be difficult not to argue that the entire Serbian nation has been complicit in harboring war criminals.
This is a recipe for membership in the EU and being considered by the international community as a partner in good standing?
