Arrest of a strongman

tauringhuang.

Jul 21st 2008
From Economist.com

Radovan Karadzic is arrested at last, in a big boost to Serbia's prospects of joining the European Union

RADOVAN KARADZIC, the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, has, at last, been arrested in Serbia. He was indicted by the United Nations’ Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague almost exactly 13 years ago for his alleged crimes during the Bosnian war, which raged from 1992 to 1995. The news is likely to have big political consequences throughout the Balkans. It will almost certainly transform Serbia's troubled relations with the European Union.

His arrest was reported on Monday July 21st. Reportedly he was detained while riding a bus in Belgrade, the capital. Mr Karadzic had been rumoured to be moving between hiding places in remote corners of southern Serbia, eastern Bosnia and Montenegro. In fact it appears that he had been living and teaching in Belgrade recently.

His UN indictment suggests that he was complicit in genocide, extermination, murder and the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from areas seized by the Bosnian Serbs during the war. The worst of his alleged crimes were the siege of Sarajevo, in which civilians were targeted, and the murder of as many as 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys when the town of Srebrenica fell in 1995. When news of his arrest reached Sarajevo on Monday night crowds took to the streets cheering and honking car horns.

Mr Karadzic was born in Montenegro and came to prominence as the head of the main Bosnian Serb nationalist party, which emerged with the end of communism in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. A poet, a convicted fraud and at one time the psychiatrist of Sarajevo’s football team, he at first co-operated with his Muslim and Croat political counterparts. But as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate his party, which took directions from Serbia's authoritarian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, made preparations for war, distributing arms provided by the Yugoslav army.

In October 1991, as war raged in neighbouring Croatia, the Bosnian parliament gathered to debate whether to declare independence from Yugoslavia. Mr Karadzic thundered that a declaration of sovereignty would take the republic “down the same highway of hell” that Croatia was suffering. He added that Bosnia's Muslim leaders would lead their people to annihilation. No compromise was possible. Mr Karadzic declared that Serb parts of Bosnia would secede and that eventually they would join a Greater Serbia.

As the war broke out in April 1992, Sarajevo was besieged and hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats were driven out of areas that Mr Karadzic intended to secure for his Republika Srpska. The war was a disaster for all, ending only with all parties exhausted in 1995. The UN indictment removed Mr Karadzic from power but his Republika Srpska still exists, although Bosnian Muslims say it was founded on genocide.

Mr Karadzic’s arrest reflects a big change in Serbian politics. Many individuals of lesser importance have been persuaded to give themselves up and some have been arrested. Until now, however, it was believed that Mr Karadzic and his wartime military commander, General Ratko Mladic (who remains at large, for now), were protected by powerful networks of former or current members of the security services.

That era is now all but over, apparently because the new Serbian government is willing and able to act. In the previous government power over the security services lay with the then prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica, who, like many Serbs, loathed the war-crimes tribunal which he believed was a political instrument designed to punish Serbs. Yet the decision to go ahead with the arrest now is a sensitive one, after the controversial acquittals in recent months of a Kosovo Albanian and of a Bosniak who had been charged with murdering Serbs.

The new government formed this month by President Boris Tadic has said that it wants to deal with the war crimes issue to remove any future obstacles to European integration. In April Serbia signed a significant agreement with the EU, the first on its road to eventual accession. That was blocked until Serbia was deemed to be co-operating fully on the capture of war-crimes suspects.

That agreement will almost certainly be unblocked now. Serbia's friends in other European capitals will demand that its path towards the EU be accelerated. This in turn will speed the European integration of the whole region. The move will also give Serbia a boost in terms of political credit as it seeks to outflank Kosovo, whose Albanians declared independence from Serbia in February.



Editor's note: We have changed the headline of this story, which was previously titled "Arrest of a monster"