That’s Mladic captured… what’s next for Serbia?
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.
