Radovan Karadzic, the Butcher of Bosnia, has finally been arrested in Belgrade after living as a fugitive from justice for eleven long years. The "mysterious" old man with the flowing white beard who became a celebrated alternative healer had been living an extraordinary double life.
He will be taken to the war crimes tribunal at The Hague to face 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Hearing the news of his arrest on Monday evening, people in Bosnia's capital Sarajevo - which he ordered to be kept under siege from the beginning of early 1992 till the end of the Bosnian war in '95 - leaving an estimated 11000 people dead, came out to celebrate.
Head of a widow's organisation summed up the sentiment around her as she said the arrest "is confirmation that every criminal will eventually face justice." The assertion though is reflective only of a normal human desire for justice; it is of little use to some 250,000 people who lost their lives, many in chillingly brutal ways, in an ethnic hatred driven conflict right in the heart of Europe.
After the Holocaust perpetuated by the Nazis, 'Never Again' became the collective slogan of the Western governments. Yet for nearly five years the Nato nations looked on clucking their tongues in pious indignation as Karadzic and his men committed one atrocity after another against the Bosnian Muslims, but doing nothing.
Russia with whom the Serbs shared the Orthodox Christian faith, Cyrillic alphabet and some history, and hence could have helped to stop the madness, however, immensely contributed to that colossal human tragedy as the most steadfast friend of hard-liners such as Dr Karadzic and Tomislav Nikolic. In April '93, about a year after the war started, the UN declared Srebrenica, along with five other towns, as a 'safe area' to be protected by its troops.
Yet Karadzic felt free to order cutting off aid supplies to the UN designated 'safe areas' and tell his troops to capture Srebrenica, where many Muslims from the adjoining areas as well had taken refuge.
As the Western nations and their powerful military force, Nato, passively watched, Karadzic's military commander and partner-in-crime, General Ratko Mladic - yet to be captured and delivered to The Hague - led his troops to take over Srebrenica, and commit the worst possible crimes against humanity. On July 11, '95 Serb soldiers rounded up some 8000 Muslim men and boys and butchered them.
Americans never tire of claiming that it was the US-led Nato air strikes that ended the war, bringing the Bosnian Serbs along with Muslims and Croats to the negotiation table in Dayton, Ohio, and later in Paris to ink US-brokered peace accords. And that the process led to the positioning of a Nato peacekeeping Implementation Force in Bosnia, and finally to the exit of Karadzic from the office of Bosnian Serb president.
True, it was the US intervention that helped, but it is also true that it took too long to act. Nato nations wasted precious time arguing the pros and cons of an intervention simply because they did not find a humanitarian concern, despite its dire nature, compelling enough to take any risk with their own soldiers' lives. When they decided to act, it did not take long for the Serbs to give in and come to the negotiating table.
Which fact lends itself to the lament that had they intervened in a timely fashion tens of thousands of those who perished in the conflict would be alive today. Sad as it is, even when Nato had established its authority its leaders, as per the regretful comments of former US mediator and ambassador to Bosnia, Richard Halbrook, did not make all-out efforts in the beginning of '96, when they had the opportunity, to get Karadzic.
According to Halbrook, "they knew exactly where he was." Yet they let him slip away. The 'Never Again' resolve did not apply to the entire tragedy, perhaps, because the victims had a different religio-ethnic identity than that of other Europeans.
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