The arrest of Radovan Karadzic is long overdue. But it alone will not resolve the problem of Serbian extremism.
Karadzic was the first president of the Republika Srpska (Serb Republic), the separatist entity that broke away from Bosnia at the beginning of the 1992-1995 war. During this time, Karadzic oversaw the destruction of his country. With the formation of the Serb-controlled entity, nearly all Bosnian Croats and Muslims (Bosniaks) were displaced from the 70 percent of Bosnian territory conquered by the Serb extremists. In the process, some 100,000 people were killed, and Karadzic's forces established brutal concentration camps and raped thousands of women.
Sarajevo suffered the longest siege in modern history, and after the fall of Srebrenica towards the war's end, Serb forces massacred approximately 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly civilians. With these crimes on his head, Radovan Karadzic disappeared shortly after the war, retreating into the realm of legend for his followers — and infamy, for the rest of the world.
The international community, responsible for imposing the rule of law on Bosnia, released frequent proclamations of the impending arrest of Karadzic, and his army commander Ratko Mladic. International forces, and eventually the government of the Serb entity, occasionally attempted to arrest Karadzic, but these maneuvers always flopped. However, the government of neighboring Serbia has gradually come under increasing pressure to cooperate with the Hague war crimes tribunal. And Serbia's possible membership in the European Union has served as a big inducement.
A relatively cooperative government was formed last month in Serbia, leading to a new resolve to please the West. First, the new government returned ambassadors to a number of countries from which they had been withdrawn after those countries recognized Kosovo, an Albanian-populated Serbian province that had declared independence in February. And now Karadzic has been detained; it is to be hoped that there will be no obstacles on his journey to The Hague.
A well-conducted trial would not only supply a modicum of (seriously delayed) justice, but will also provide an authoritative historical record of the war. Karadzic's arrest will undoubtedly benefit Serbia, which has played a destabilizing role in the region for much of the past twenty years.
If Serbia can go one step further and arrest Mladic, one more obstacle to that country's admittance to the EU will have been removed. But a couple of arrests and a handshake between Serbia and the international community would not go far enough to disinfect Serbia’s extremist political culture or to rectify the ethnic cleansing that Karadzic carried out and that has left Bosnia a tormented place.
Bosnia remains a divided, dysfunctional country, still led by the wartime leaders and their heirs, and weakly supervised as an international semi-protectorate. It will require much more than the trial of Karadzic to make it whole.
Peter Lippman is a Seattle-based human rights activist. He has spent several years in Serbia and Bosnia, before and after the wars in the 1990s.