One former Bosnian war correspondent's view
The arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has pulled into sharp focus the various war crimes committed across Europe. Peter Bale, who reported from Sarajevo during the Bosnian civil war, explains why we should care.
On All Soul’s Day in 1995, I stood looking out across a snow-covered football field beside the stadium used for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
The field in the heart of one of the most beautiful and sophisticated cities in Europe had been turned into a graveyard, a mass of Muslim-style stone markers. Even as mourners visited their loved ones’ graves there, Serb snipers had picked them off with gunfire from the surrounding hills.
This is only one example of the violence and horror of the Bosnian civil war in the early 1990s in which the siege of Sarajevo led by Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was the pinnacle.
I covered conflict in the former Yugoslavia as a correspondent and editor for Reuters. But for anyone under 30, the arrest this week of Karadzic, one of the principle figures charged with war crimes in that conflict , may be baffling and its importance unclear.
News coverage has centred on his extraordinary double life hiding out in the Serbian capital Belgrade as a new age healer – sporting an impressive beard and pony tail – and archival footage of alleged war crimes in the Bosnian civil war in the early 1990s – around 15 years ago.
But who was he? Why does he matter? What happened in Bosnia that has relevance today?
Tracing the perpetrators
The Karadzic arrest matters at a European, international and even a personal level.
Like the pursuit of Nazis after WWII, the Karadzic arrest is a reminder to all who commit war crimes that the law will eventually catch up with them. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes.
The war crimes court in The Hague has been portrayed as a toothless front for European politicians who failed to live up to promises to honour the victims of the three major Yugoslavian conflicts.
But the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has spent years gathering evidence – from news footage to the dental records of corpses in mass graves, wells and burial sites across the former Yugoslavia. Forget CSI, this is the real thing: painstaking excavation to identify the victims and trace the perpetrators of the worst war crimes in Europe since WWII.
That is really the point: this is supposed to be post-war Europe. Modern Europe almost by definition is not a place which can tolerate war crimes. Yet Radovan Karadzic, his military chief Ratko Mladic and their puppet master former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, dug into Serbia’s history of national paranoia and victimhood to justify killing on a biblical scale a few hundred miles away from Vienna.
No grudge is forgotten
Milosevic was the big catch for the Hague Tribunal. He died in 2006 in custody and before a verdict could be delivered. He had spent years conducting his own trial, haranguing the court, questioning its jurisdiction and running a campaign driven by the perverse logic of isolation, twisted nationalism and perverted religiosity characteristic of the Orthodox Serb former communists of his generation.
After Milosevic, Karadzic, a Serbian nationalist poet and psychiatrist, is the next big fish – bigger than any of the rogue’s gallery of characters from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Karadzic’s fake Republika Srpska – to face trial.
Serbs will tell you that only their war veterans risk trial. Not so. Croats and Bosnian Muslims have also been charged. No side was exempt from the appalling fratricidal killing – no grudge is ever forgotten in the Balkans and 300-years of accumulated bitterness can turn to blood-letting with a skilled orators and manipulators like Karadzic and Milosevic in charge.
The arrest of Karadzic has importance far beyond the Balkans – the peninsula between Austria and Turkey that has hosted great conflicts from Islamic invasion to WWI and the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The Balkans include Greece, the former Yugoslav republics, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria and Romania. It is the bridge between the European Union and would-be entrant Turkey – reminding us why peace in Europe is so important and potentially fragile.
Medieval siege
Karadzic is being handed over and Kosovo allowed independence so Serbia can put decades of communist waste and dead-end nationalism behind it and join peace and prosperity in the EU.
On a personal level, I see the Karadzic arrest as part of the unfinished work of one of the bravest war correspondents of his era, Kurt Schork. A Reuters journalist who stayed in Sarajevo through the war, he bore witness to the crimes against the civilian population of the besieged city.
Schork told the story of ordinary people in Sarajevo and wider Bosnia. His reports were instrumental in pushing nervous and conflicted leaders in the White House, Brussels and Downing Street to act. He was killed reporting from Sierra Leone in May 2000. A Sarajevo street is named in his honour.
What he and others reported in Sarajevo was a medieval siege – a war crime in which tanks, mortars and artillery pummelled homes and businesses for 1,335 days. Imagine Muswell Hill being attacked from Alexandra Palace or Edinburgh being fired on from The Mount and you get the picture.
On that All Soul’s Day in 1995, the incongruity between the hopeful symbolism of the Olympic stadium, the alpine beauty and social sophistication of Sarajevo and the impromptu graveyard was striking. Karadzic and his supporters turned their neighbours into targets and brought genocide to 20th Century Europe.
His arrest is belated evidence that civilised society won’t let such crimes stand.
Peter Bale is the executive producer of MSN UK and a former Reuters correspondent.
July 24 2008
Radovan Karadzic arrested: special report
Site of The Hague war crimes tribunal