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This week Ratko Mladic, Serbia’s most-wanted war crimes suspect, was finally arrested. Captured whilst living under an assumed name in Lazarevo, a town with old ties to the Milosevic family, the former General has been found fit to stand trial and has until Monday to launch an appeal against extradition to the Hague.

Due process likewise awaits Serbia’s EU bid, which has just cast off its greatest impediment. While cynics and conspiracy theorists are keen to poke holes in the affair –- that this ‘hiding in plain sight’ thing is a little too unbelievable; that the timing of the capture is all politics, not policing; that Serbia knew where he was all along and was just biding its time — the fact remains: Mladić is now in custody and the great wheels of international justice must now creak into action.

Still, the reaction of one man, interviewed on Channel 4 news, makes me wonder if the Serbian government hasn’t been just the slightest bit duplicitous about the whole ‘we searched high and low’ thing:

“We are all Serbs here, so everybody loves him. We would never have sold him out, not for any amount of money.”

What I found especially interesting was the public’s reaction to the arrest. Channel 4 and ITV news presented a few vox pops that ran along the same lines: “he is old news, he is not part of Serbia now, and I as a twentysomething don’t have anything to do with the things that happened during the war”. 

It’s a very different take on collective responsibility, at least if you hold the German WW2 example as the gold standard, which the West largely does. I understand the modern Serbian approach, though: Mladić and his actions really didn’t have anything to do with these people. But it remains to be seen whether Europe will accept that perspective, and whether the rift between those who did live through that time, and those who didn’t, will become a factor in Serbia’s recovery, or tear it apart further.

Mladic’s capture: BBC news timeline

TIME’s take on the capture and what it means

Belgrade, Serbia– written on the way out of the country after six fascinating, exhausting and profoundly humbling days. I’ll post subsequently on different aspects of the trip and my research, but first I want to recognise what this is about: hearing, sharing and learning from other people’s stories.

My trip to Belgrade was wonderful: fascinating for the people I met and the things I saw and did; exhausting for the pace of it all (and the rather less than comfortable bed in my flat). No big surprises there. But as I prepare to settle back into London the best way I can describe my current state of mind is ‘humbled’. 

As a journalist – and I came to Serbia as a journalist – you ask a lot of people. In the name of getting the story, you ask people to tell you, a stranger from another place, another generation, often another culture, about their most personal selves. You ask them to share the experiences that shaped them, to name their hopes and to confide their fears and shames. You ask them to lay their most precious cargo on the table so you can question, interpret, and export their lives to the readers back home.

It’s a colossal ask, but if you are lucky, they do. Here in Belgrade, over coffee, tea, wine, beer and rakija, I was very, very lucky. 

I met A, who still wears his country’s past heavy on his heart. He described ringing in the new year of 1992 alone, listening to Mozart’s Requiem: “I refused to join the celebration.”

I met L, who could pinpoint the day his childhood ended: when his father was taken to war, and the role of household leader fell to his eight-year-old shoulders.

I met O, whose family left Bosnia as refugees and walked into Serbia: “During Milosevic, I ate only potatoes. Now my fridge is not full-full, but it’s better. I have enough to eat.”

I met J, who told me of her pride and relief when she convinced her father to vote against Milosevic in the nineties, and now, years later, of her fear and sadness when she sees flickers of the same nationalist spirit in her high school students.

I met B, who described being abroad on a business trip when Zoran Djindjich was assassinated: “I was in a shop when I heard, and I cried like a baby.”

I met L, desperate to leave Serbia so he doesn’t waste any more of his life. He described going a rock concert several years ago, too old for the band but determined to have that teenage experience anyway, now that it was finally available in Serbia. Yet it left him feeling sad: “I have this sense of a lost decade… it should have happened earlier.”

I met A, who recalled being heartsick during a recent DJ gig when he was forced to comply with the teenage birthday girl’s demands for nationalist turbo-folk, even though Zoran Djindjic’s son was present at the event, and to play those records was “to spit on everything his father had done”.

I met S, a student as full of hope as any student anywhere, whose voice broke as she tried to defend her country’s future against a past she had nothing to do with: “We have a lot of valuable people here. We have athletes and scientists, young experts and old experts, people who would help you. OK, we have some bad things, but I think you have that in your country, too.”

Hvala, Beograd.

This is part two in a series of two. Part one is entitled Bosnia: why we just can’t learn.

There is no one act of rebuilding after conflict, just as there is no linear path. In Bosnia’s case in particular, beyond the personal experiences of conflict and reconciliation, there are national and international political issues to be reckoned with. 

What path out of conflict?

One thing this talk emphasised — something I feel should be emphasised more around the subject of life post-conflict — is that rebuilding and reconciling are processes, not events. What’s more, these processes are unique to the conflicts they serve to resolve — or, depending on your view, absolve. 

For Pervanic, the admission of involvement is critical: people need to tell their stories without fear of being attacked of judged. They need to say, ‘yes, we did this’ in order for all parties to come to an agreement of what happened, and then move on. To me, there is something very personal about this take on reconciliation.

For Ashdown, the focus is less on personal experience and more on the mechanisms of societal transition. Education — “the thing we fought the war for” — is a force of change, but it’s a slow process hampered by the beliefs and nomenclature children absorb everywhere outside of the classroom. The creation and maintenance of multi-ethnic spaces is also a huge part of this process.

And this is a fundamental difference between the two viewpoints. Ashdown, perhaps because his involvement was less personal and because he isn’t still penalised for his nationality, as Pervanic maintains he is (Bosnians face restricted travel in Europe), is willing to let things take a little longer, whereas Pervanic — again, likely due to his own very immediate involvement — isn’t willing to wait and hope and see. His stance is that education and other grassroots efforts are not enough — that change must come from leadership.

Several weeks ago I attended a typically, irritatingly thought-provoking discussion at the Frontline Club. I am a huge supporter of the club — indeed I am applying for membership — but the one down side to the mind-bendingly intelligent debate I get to absorb at the club is this panging, demi-nostalgic sneak of a yearn that goes something like, “What would my life be like if I had become a war reporter/foreign affairs correspondent/listened to my aunties and done that Master’s degree after all?”

— but I digress.

Bosnia: Will the uncertain peace deal hold? was a fundraising event for Most Mira, a Bosnian charity founded by Kemal Pervanic, a thirtysomething Bosnian man who has truly lived through hell: he is a survivor of the Omarska concentration camps, and he has grown to forgive those who imprisoned and tortured him. 

Pervanic was joined on the panel by Lord Paddy Ashdown, the former High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and an authority on the politics and policies of the region. Allan Little, a BBC correspondent whose beat for a long time included Yugoslavia, chaired the event (and did an exceptional job of it).

In keeping with the theme of this blog — social change and the ideals and mechanisms that enable it — I’d like to pick up on some of the personal and political issues (not now, feminists) that emerged during the panel, and explore them on their own and through the prism of Sunday’s 15th anniversary of the genocide at Srebenica. I will do this in two posts — this is the first.