WHEN THE president of Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s was arrested Monday on genocide charges, it was a milestone not just for Serbia's bid for respectability in Europe but also for the international cause of bringing accused war criminals to justice. The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted Radovan Karadzic 13 years ago. His ability to remain at large in the Balkans for all this time cast doubt on the resolve of Serbs to break from their nationalist past, as well as on the seriousness of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. By arresting Karadzic in a Belgrade suburb, the Serbian government won stripes for it and the tribunal.
Karadzic's capture comes just two weeks after a new, pro-Western government took power in Belgrade. Surely this is no coincidence. According to government spokesmen, police came upon Karadzic while on the hunt for the other major accused Bosnian Serb war criminal, army commander Ratko Mladic. The highest ranking accused war criminal from the Balkan wars, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, died during his trial in The Hague in 2006.
An arrest of Mladic would be the final confirmation of the new government's commitment to ending the dark chapter of the 1990s. But already the European Union official in charge of EU expansion, Olli Rehn, said Karadzic's capture would facilitate Serbia's joining the union. Charges against Karadzic, who was a psychiatrist before entering politics, include genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The tribunal indicted him for his role in the bombardment and siege of Sarajevo, which resulted in more than 10,000 deaths, and in the mass killing of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
The US diplomat who brokered the talks that ended the Bosnian war, Richard Holbrooke, has described Karadzic as more of a "real racist believer" than Mladic or Milosevic. "Karadzic really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims," Holbrooke said, "whereas Milosevic was an opportunist." In the first years after Karadzic's indictment, however, neither NATO nor governments in the Balkans made any serious move to capture him, making the tribunal's action look like an empty gesture. Now he faces the possibility of a trial and life imprisonment, and other war criminals around the globe have greater reason to fear the same fate.
To the credit of the Serbian nation, it is their own elected government that recognizes that the country's brightest hopes lie in embracing the values of today's Europe - not in the ethnic cleansing and death camps of the 1990s.
