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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2011 > May > 28 > Entry
Editorial: Mladic arrest turns corner in Balkans history
Ratko Mladic was hunted for longer than Osama bin Laden, since the mid 1990s. And for good reason.
He was a monster whose evil culminated in the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, Bosnia. That event, happening after the United Nations had sent peacekeeping troops, was humiliating to the West and was one of the factors prompting Washington to bomb Serb targets and eventually convene historic peace negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Before Srebrenica, Gen. Mladic had led the four-year siege of Sarajevo, in which that city of defenseless civilians was surrounded and bombed from the mountains encircling it. Ten thousand people died.
This wasn’t war, if it takes two to make war. Troops whom Gen. Mladic led also used rape as a weapon of war.
His arrest Thursday, May 26, ends a chapter of history. He and the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, and the president of neighboring Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, had been among the many alleged war criminals indicted for war crimes. Their names formed a triumvirate.
The other two had, after long delays, been brought to the International Criminal Court at The Hague for justice.
For years, many Europeans had believed the government of Serbia could find Gen. Mladic if it really wanted to. And Europe insisted that it do so if Serbia wanted to join the European Union.
But turning him over was widely opposed in Serbia. Finally, when the government acted, it reportedly did so because it feared a pending report that it was not cooperating with the other Europeans on the search. It’s too bad that kind of pressure was needed to make the arrest happen. Ever since the war, Bosnia has looked to Serbia to make a statement about war atrocities by going after the top perpetrators. Bosnians have said that the action was necessary to heal the wounds of war.
The late Richard Holbrooke, father of the Dayton Peace Accords, always said that the arrest of Mladic was necessary if Bosnia and the Balkans were to move to a new era. Even if the EU is what made Serbia act, not concern about Bosnia, at least the issue is now in the past.
And it’s good news that the government of Serbia is more concerned about political and economic relations with the West than about placating diehards in Serbia by claiming to be unfairly singled out by the Hague.
Indirectly, at least, Serbia’s action can be seen as a good sign for Bosnia. Hardline Serb nationalists within Bosnia — the people most hostile to the idea of a Bosnia that is genuinely united across lines of religion — have looked to Serbia for support. If Serbia is focused on relations with Europe, which wants integration, the hardliners may have to moderate their dreams.
Beyond that, the cause in arresting Gen. Mladic is communicating to other potential war criminals that there’s a price to be paid. The Hague is for real; it has important friends, and, in pursuit of those it indicts, it doesn’t give up easily.
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