Editorial
Law catches up with Mladic
Justice now closer to victims
The arrest of Ratko Mladic on Thursday brings the prospects of justice for his victims remarkably closer. His capture ends a sixteen-year period in which the once swaggering Bosnian Serb general evaded the justice that was, and is, his due owing to the murder he organised of tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the three-year period between 1992 and 1995. In tandem with Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, Mladic inaugurated, with no qualms of conscience, a pogrom now considered to have been the worst in the history of Europe since the outrages committed by the Nazis before and during the Second World War.
Mladic's arrest is proof that while the process of justice may turn out to be quite long, it certainly is a sure one. The Balkan wars of the 1990s, so ardently launched by a barbaric Serb leadership amidst the ruins of a crumbling Yugoslavia and so enthusiastically pursued by it, remains a stain on human conscience. And yet the truth that Milosevic, once the powerful leader of the Serbs, was hauled off to The Hague to face trial for genocide before an international criminal court for former Yugoslavia was a sign of criminality having its comeuppance. Milosevic died a prisoner as his trial was underway. But his two accomplices, Karadzic and Mladic, remain to explain to the world the dark instincts that led them into murdering people in cool-headed manner. Countless Bosnian Muslim homes have been without their fathers, brothers and sons. They were all led away to death by Serbian murder squads.
Mladic should now speedily be extradited to The Hague. For the government of Serbian President Boris Tadic, the act not only shows its willingness to turn away from the past but also for Serbia to embrace the future through membership of the European Union. There must never be a Milosevic, a Karadzic, a Mladic again to turn our world upside down. Ethnic cleansing must not rear its ugly head again.
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