The Arrest of Mladic

I suppose it was quite inevitable that I would have to make some comment on this. I never planned on making this blog a political forum, I thought of it only as an extended travel diary - a sort of consolidated place which might form a more innovative improvement on sending tedious group emails. Maybe the frantic pace of news this year has kept me alert and opiniated, maybe it is simply that I've realised that this is a good place to raise awareness of some terrible things that have happened recently to people I knew. But it's also true that something as topical as the arrest of Ratko Mladic provides an interesting insight into one of the places I have been writing about, and for those of you who might have been interested on my musings on the subject, I feel that the large amount of press that this arrest has generated about Bosnia - a rare occurrence these days, now that both the international media and the internationally community itself is moving onto sexier, racier events and places - that some of this coverage might atone for the background information and the overall picture which I never really felt myself capable of providing.

So I felt it worthwhile to post an article which I found both powerful and moving today. It's written by one of the journalists who originally uncovered the existence of concentration camps in Northeastern Bosnia in 1992, exposing the details of ethnic cleansing internationally for the first time. "Ratko Mladic's arrest is a hollow victory in a country that refuses to apologise", it is entitled. It's not particularly long and I highly recommend reading it for anyone interested in the current state of affairs in Bosnia, because it is for me at least a response to my inner dismay that for all the extensive coverage of the arrest - the headlines, the reporters running back to the Balkans, the statements of praise from international dignitaries - none of it was really about Bosnia at all.

All the stories and the face-to-camera commentaries talked instead about Serbia: about it's EU candidacy, about its previous reluctance (now amended and forgiven) to arrest a man whose whereabouts was well known, about the implications for geo-political realignment and economic development in the region. None of the stories were about Bosnia, no one went and reported from Sarajevo. Glib statements that the survivors and the families of the victims of Srebrenica welcomed this news that "justice would finally be done" were left unsubstantiated. I really wished that I'd been back in Sarajevo last Thursday, to see and feel the reaction there. But my suspicions that there would be little celebrating were later confirmed by friends who mentioned the air of sadness, disappointment and anti-climax. It must have been a day for remembering - both in terms of the good memories of the individuals and the unbearable memories of what happened to them - and for the bitterness of futility.

Serbia and its politicians have been heaped with praise for doing something that they had the ability to do years ago. The timing alone strikes me as politically suspicious (Catherine Ashton's visit, Serbian state TV apologising for the propaganda it broadcast in the 1990s). The arrest has not been accompanied by the repeat of previous apologies or acknowledgements, only by Mladic and his supporters' insistence that he stands wrongly accused. Like Milosevic, he is in poor health and might potentially die before a trial is concluded. He won't be tried in Bosnia by Bosnian courts, prosecutors or judges. Even if found guilty, the trial is unlikely to provide information about the whereabouts of victims (or their remains) which are still missing, still buried in undiscovered mass graves. The arrest will make no difference to the fraught political situation within Bosnia, where those referred to as "the victims" of Sarajevo and Srebrenica generally feel that the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign was a success, resulting as it did in the Serbian-controlled Republika Srpska - one of Bosnia's federal entities, taking up about half of the country's territory - which shows no sign of wanting to share a state with those eternally-referenced "victims".

As Ed Vulliamy puts it in the article mentioned above, "the Republika Srpska makes no secret of its desire to accede to Serbia proper, or to make Bosnia such a dysfunctional state that it becomes pointless".

I specialised during my Masters in international law, particularly international criminal justice. Obviously I am pleased that this man has finally been arrested - and that unlike some others on the 'most wanted' list, that this problem wasn't solved with several bullets to the head, administered by the agents of a foreign country. I look forward to pondering the legal issues in his forthcoming extradition and the upcoming legal battle and inevitable delaying tactics. And I don't argue that this Vulliamy's article is an impartial or objective account of Bosnia today or of Mladic himself - far from it, really. But at least it bothers to stop take a look around Bosnia and see what the arrest means for this beautiful, troubled, tragic little country, and that's something that has been sorely lacking since last Thursday.