Hot on the heels of the indictment for genocide of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir by the International Criminal Court (ICC), comes last night's welcome news that Europe's most wanted man, the odious Radovan Karadžić, has finally been arrested in Serbia after more than a decade on the run.
The first half of the last decade was dominated internationally by the ongoing crisis in the former Yugoslavia, with the aggressive Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milošević inspiring the break-up of that multi-ethnic federation and its descent into war and chaos. Karadžić played the willing stooge in Bosnia, whipping up the Bosnian Serb population into a ferment of hatred towards their neighbours in what had always been the most ethnically integrated of all the Yugoslav republics.
For three years, this former psychiatrist and amateur poet symbolised the banality of evil on our television screens, preening himself on the international stage while his forces murdered, raped and tortured their way across the shattered country. While Sarajevo lay under medieval siege and genocide was conducted in Srebrenica, the international community sat by and watched, with our Conservative government shamefully in the vanguard of attempts to prevent international intervention to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims. Indeed, it was partly in reaction to the appalling international performance in Bosnia that a new generation of 'liberal interventionists' came to the fore on both sides of the Atlantic, determined to place human rights concerns at the strategic level of foreign policy discourse.
Following his indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Karadžić went to ground, apparently protected by a network of Serb sympathisers resembling the old Odessa network in terms of their ability to operate across official international borders and under the noses of international forces. Serbian leaders were repeatedly accused by the West of being complicit in the failure to arrest him, or at the very least being disinterested in assisting with this.
Why do I mention the latter point? Well, taking a theme from an earlier post by Ben Rogers about the ICC on this site, what is particularly interesting about the capture of Karadžić is that it seems that the prospect of better relations with the democratic world sparked an about turn on the part of Serbia. As this article in The Economist makes clear, Serbia's sudden interest in detaining this reprehensible individual is inherently linked to the new government's desire to join the European Union. So far from being a threat to democracy, an international tribunal has led to its strengthening and the solidifying of universal ideals. As well as reminding all tyrants that you can run, but you can't hide forever. Now, while ICTY is admittedly a slightly different beast to the ICC, what does Daniel Hannan make of that?
