Daily Times

The much-feared Serb general, Ratko Mladic, considered responsible for the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with two others, has finally been tracked down to his hiding place in a non-descript Serbian village after 16 years of living underground. It is doubtful whether the Serbian government would had shown interest in bringing the man responsible for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in 1995 to justice if it was not under pressure from European countries to do so as a condition for its admission to the European Union (EU). The Serbian government succeeding Slobodan Miloševiæ signed an agreement in 2002 with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to turn over Serb war crimes suspects, but it was not until the election of President Boris Tadic in 2008 that vigorous efforts were made to fulfil this commitment in pursuit of Serbia’s ambitions to join the EU. The other major culprit of the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slobodan Miloševiæ, died in prison in 2006 while being tried for war crimes. The third culprit, Radovan Karadzic — who was indicted for war crimes by the ICTY against Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats during the Siege of Sarajevo, as well as ordering the Srebrenica massacre — was arrested in 2008 in Belgrade.

It would be pertinent to revisit the ultimate fate suffered by the federation of Yugoslavia that passed its first constitution in December 31, 1945, immediately after World War II under the towering leadership of war hero Marshal Tito, to establish six constituent republics. Each republic had considerable autonomy in the form of an internal constitution, supreme court, prime minister and president. At the top of the Yugoslav government was Tito as president, the federal prime minister, and the federal parliament. After Tito’s death in 1980, ethnic tensions grew in Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia saw Slobodan Miloševiæ’s rise to power in Serbia amidst a growth of nationalism in all the former Yugoslavian republics subsequent to the collapse of communist governments throughout Eastern Europe. Miloševiæ, the new strongman of Yugoslavia, tried to play on the revived Serb nationalism, but ended up alienating all the other ethnic groups in the federation. The tensions between the centrist Serbs and pro-autonomy republics escalated following the multiparty elections in 1990, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, finally leading to the horrific Yugoslavian wars when the Yugoslav People’s Army unleashed carnage against non-Serbs, particularly Bosnian Muslims. In that civil war, Ratko Mladic played a pivotal role in carrying out the orders of the political leadership. He has already been indicted for war crimes by the ICTY and will now be presented before the court. Changing times and politics overtook the Serbian general, once dearly protected by the old guard in the security forces, and brought him to the dock. *