Karadzic and Mladic must be arrested

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Imagine the scene. It is early 1945, and Allied troops have just overrun the first of the Nazi death camps. It is no longer possible to deny the genocide. So the 'Big Three' -- Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin -- get together and issue a stern warning: "We insist that Hitler step down immediately and permanently from all public functions and take no part in governmental decisions."

You find that a bit short of the mark? Implausible? Completely gutless? Then why did the leaders of the G-7 countries -- the U.S., Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada -- get together in Lyon last month and issued exactly that statement, substituting the name of Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs?

Karadzic and his henchman, Gen. Ratko Mladic, planned and led the Serbian 'ethnic cleansing' that killed well over 100,000 innocent Moslem civilians in the parts of Bosnia they intended to include in their Bosnian Serb Republic between 1992 to 1995. Their calculated terrorism drove about two million other people to flee their homes.

The United Nations international war-crimes tribunal at The Hague has already indicted both men for genocide, and issued international arrest warrants last Thursday. A multi-national team of 290 forensic experts has begun digging up the grim evidence at one of twelve mass grave sites around Srebrenica, scene of the last big massacre, and eyewitness testimony at The Hague is documenting Mladic's presence at the massacres.

So Mladic and his master, Radovan Karadzic, will soon be in jail, right? Wrong. They are still running the Bosnian Serb state today, and NATO patrols driving through their 'capital', Pale, are under explicit orders not to seek them out. (Their implicit orders are not to recognize the monsters even if they trip over them).

What is the point of NATO intervention in Bosnia if it doesn't remove the authors of the genocide from power and brings them to justice? Don't NATO governments realize that an election carried out in these circumstances will achieve nothing? Don't they realize it will mean the war resumes as soon as NATO pulls out?

Of course they do. They just don't care enough about that to risk the casualties NATO troops might face if they tried to enforce the Dayton accords or the international court's arrest warrants.

Bosnia is still primarily a face-saving operation for the West. And the British government, which sabotaged every attempt to bring about a decisive military intervention and stop the genocide in Bosnia, is still beavering away behind the scenes to ensure that nothing decisive is done to punish the guilty.

But you can't just blame the British Foreign Office, however shameful and cowardly its policies are. Other governments have proven more than ready to cop out, too, once the British blazed a path for them. And why not? After all, nothing bad is going to happen in France or Canada as a result.

Here is why not. It comes in the form of an interview that British journalist Ed Vulliamy recently had with the administrator of Camp Omarska, one of the concentration camps around Prijedor in northern Bosnia where the Serbs tortured, starved, raped, and finally murdered thousands of Moslem detainees.

Vulliamy first met Dr Milan Kovacevic in 1992, when he was the first Western journalist to gain access to the concentration camps. He met Kovacevic again this February -- and this time, the deeply troubled former camp administrator wanted to talk.

"We knew very well what was done at Auschwitz and Dachau, and we knew very well how it started and how it was done," Kovacevic said. "What we did was not the same as Auschwitz and Dachau, but it was a mistake. It was planned as a camp for people, not a concentration camp."

"But then it turned into something else. I cannot explain the loss of control... You could call it a collective madness. If someone acquitted me, saying that I was not a part of that collective madness, then I would have to admit that this was not true....Every man has his good side, and his bad side. Where he is the important thing."

Individual Serbs are no more prone to good or evil than anyone else. The paranoid style of Serbian nationalism, the self-pitying conviction that Serbs are always misunderstood and victimized by everybody else, makes them more vulnerable than most other people to manipulation by power-hungry fanatics. But the manipulation still has to be done -- deliberately and consciously.

That was what Karadzic and Mladic did, and a generation of Bosnian Serbs were swept up in the savagery. As much as their victims, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It could have happened to other people. And it has happened to other peoples. That is precisely why Karadzic and Mladic must be arrested and tried. Otherwise the cruelty, the contempt for human life, the sense that anything goes is legitimized, not just in Bosnia but elsewhere. The war crimes tribunal is not trying to make the world safer for Bosnians. It is working to make it safer for us.