The arrest of alleged war criminal Ratko Mladic is not getting nearly the media coverage that attended the killing of Osama bin Laden. But I’m sure this does not diminish at all the vindication it portends for Mladic’s victims.
Granted, this discrepancy in coverage stems from the fact that bin Laden was a global terrorist who masterminded the most devastating attacks on America since Pearl Harbor; whereas, Mladic was just a Balkan thug who perpetrated mass murder against an ethnic minority relatively few people knew or cared anything about.
Indeed, there are African despots still at-large who have perpetrated genocides that make the genocide Mladic is accused of perpetrating seem like little more than schoolyard bullying. The difference of course is that he perpetrated his in Europe. More significantly, the way Commander Mladic and his Serbian forces ethnically cleansed 8,000 Muslims during the Bosnian War (1992-95) was eerily reminiscent of the way Nazi commanders and their German soldiers ethnically cleansed 6,000,000 Jews during World War II.
This is why everyone in the Serbian leadership was indicted by the UN War Crimes Tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity: most notably, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was indicted in 1999, then arrested and extradited to The Hague in 2001, where he was found dead in his cell in the midst of his trial in 2006; Bosnia’s wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic was indicted in 1995, then arrested and extradited to The Hague in 2008, where he is currently emulating the farce Milosevic made of his trial by representing himself (and I predict he will meet a similar fate); and Mladic was indicted in 1995, then arrested on Thursday and will be extradited to The Hague within days, where I predict he too will wither away and die in obscurity.
In the meantime, just as Pakistani officials are having a hard time explaining how bin Laden could have hidden in plain sight in Pakistan for five years without their complicity, Serbian officials will have an even harder time explaining how Mladic could have hidden in plain sight in Serbia for 16 years without theirs.
The truth of course is that government officials, though not necessarily national leaders, were complicit in both cases. What is also true however is that neither country will suffer any adverse consequence for its complicity.
Nothing demonstrates this quite like the U.S. lauding Pakistan for returning a critical part of the stealth helicopter that crashed landed during the raid on bin Laden’s compound. After all, it seems clear to me that Pakistan delayed this return to allow China, which is fast becoming its most-favored superpower patron, to reverse engineer all of the helicopter’s top-secret features. Not to mention the tail-wagging-the-dog spectacle of the U.S. thanking Pakistan for finally granting CIA agents access to the compound weeks after their counterparts (ISI agents) had already combed it for all incriminating evidence – not just against al-Qaeda but also against Pakistan.
The point is that the praise the U.S. and EU are heaping on Serbia for finally arresting Mladic is patently contrived.
Here, for example, is a little of what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is saying:
The United States welcomes the arrest of Ratko Mladic by Serbian security services earlier today. We commend President Tadic, the Government of Serbia, its security services and all those who have labored for years to bring Mladic to justice… We hope that Serbia’s action in arresting Mladic will help Serbia move on, provide the opportunity to gain admission into the European Union and enable Serbia to build a brighter future as part of a whole, free, and peaceful Europe.
(State.gov, May 26, 2011)
But here is a little background information from one of my previous commentaries that puts U.S. reaction to this arrest into proper context:
[W]here a popular uprising against Milosevic sealed his arrest and transfer to The Hague for trial in 2001, the notorious Mladic and Karadzic remain at-large. This is why Washington imposed conditions on the disbursement of aid to Belgrade. In fact, U.S. military intelligence indicated that Belgrade was actively abetting Karadzic and Mladic in their flight from justice and Washington assumed that making the aid conditional would induce Belgrade to facilitate their arrest and transfer.
Yet from the moment the fund was established, the dynamics between Belgrade and Washington took on the spectacle of, well, the tail wagging the dog. After all, under the leadership of Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, Belgrade refused to honor the agreed conditions. Instead, it argued that negotiating the voluntary surrender of these suspects was the more prudent way for it to assist the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). And, to appease Washington, Belgrade pointed to a succession of surrenders by former aides to Mladic (including Zdravko Tolimir, Milan Gvero and Radivoje Miletic) as sufficient evidence of its performance to be rewarded with financial disbursements.
But Washington was clearly being wagged. For example, despite declaring in January of this year that Belgrade was not cooperating fully with the ICTY, Washington made quite a show last week of handing over a $10 million disbursement without any evidence to the contrary. Moreover, this comes after a similar declaration last year that Belgrade was failing to cooperate which, nonetheless, was also followed in short order by $73.6 million in disbursements (albeit, ostensibly, “in assistance to organisations and programmes outside of the central government” in Belgrade).
Of course, Washington’s quagmire in Iraq and its feckless hunt for Osama bin Laden provide the only explanation for Belgrade’s apparent leverage in this respect. Indeed, Washington is acutely aware of how politically compromising it would be to withhold promised funds because of Belgrade’s failure to apprehend Mladic and Karadzic when Belgrade can justify its failure so poignantly by pointing to Washington’s failure to arrest Zarqawi in Iraq or Osama bin Laden, wherever he may be.
(Serbs confound Americans as they hide war criminals and seek U.S. aid, The iPINIONS Journal, June 15, 2005)
With that, I hope I can be forgiven my cynical view that the Serbs are giving up the 69-year-old Mladic now only because they deem it politically advantageous to do so. No doubt reports that two strokes have left this once robust and dynamic commander a mere shell of himself – with one foot already in the grave – factored greatly in this regard.
But lawyers arguing that he’s too sick to stand trial will prove no more persuasive for him than it proved for old Nazis who have been captured. Even less persuasive will be Serbian nationalists protesting his arrest the way Muslim radicals protested the killing of bin Laden….
All the same, apropos of this being politically advantageous, Serbia’s shrewd and pragmatic president, Boris Tadic, made it abundantly clear in announcing Mladic’s arrest that, in return, the Serbs expect not only increased financial aid from America … without even the pretense of conditions, but also full integration into the European Union … without further delay. And, in the tail-wagging-the-dog fashion to which they’ve become accustomed, the Serbs will be duly rewarded on both counts in due course.
I simply ask the EU to fulfill its part. We fulfilled our part… We are demanding that Serbia, just like Croatia, simultaneously be the date for the start of entry talks and not just candidate status… There are no obstacles left. Stopping Serbia would be purely political.
(Associated Press, May 30, 2011)
This, notwithstanding EU suspicions that Serbia is still harboring one more notorious war-crimes fugitive, Goran Hadzic, who led Croatian Serb rebels during the war.
Finally, to be fair, I feel obliged to note that political and military leaders from other factions (namely Croats and Muslims) were also arrested for war crimes.
Most notably, Croatian General Ante Gotovina, who was accused of ethnic cleansing in a 1995 military campaign to seize back land from rebel Serbs, was arrested in 2005, convicted just last month, and sentenced to 24 years in prison. (Prosecutors in The Hague are on record stating that if Croatian President Franjo Tudjman did not die in December 1999 he too would have been arrested.) And less than a year ago the war crimes tribunal ordered Kosovo’s former prime minister, the Albanian Ramush Haradinaj, to face retrial two years after he was acquitted of torture, rape, and murder. The tribunal found that his first trial was marred by witness intimidation. He was arrested and extradited again in July 2010. His retrial in ongoing….
Still, there’s no gainsaying that Serbs comprise the vast majority of those who were duly arrested, convicted, and sentenced for committing crimes against humanity during the Bosnian War.
Related commentaries:
Serbs confound Americans as they hide war criminals…
Arrest of Karadzic…
Zarqawi is dead…
Bin Laden…