Former Serbian commander Ratko Mladic has been arrested for alleged war crimes committed in the 1990s.
CNN (“Former Serbian commander Ratko Mladic is arrested“):
Police in Serbia have arrested former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic, the highest-ranking war crimes suspect still at large from the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbia’s president announced Thursday.
“Today we arrested Ratko Mladic,” Serbian President Boris Tadic said. Tadic said Mladic was detained in Serbia. The president said the arrest will help the process of reconciliation throughout the Balkans. “All war criminals must face justice,” Tadic said.
Police are doing DNA tests on the man to determine if he is Mladic, the radio station reported, citing a leading Croatian newspaper. The radio station said it “contacted the police, but was told only that an identity check and DNA analysis were ‘ongoing.’”
Mladic, 69, is wanted on charges of genocide, extermination and murder, among others, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The tribunal accuses him of “direct involvement in the genocide committed after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995,” and the killing of “close to 8,000 men and boys following the fall of this enclave.” The massacre of the Muslim men and boys is thought to be the largest individual slaughter in Europe since the end of World War II.
The 1992-1995 Bosnian war was the longest of the wars spawned by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Backed by the government of then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb forces seized control of more than half the country and launched a campaign against the Muslim and Croat populations.
Mladic has been on the run since the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended in 1995.
The Srebrenica massacre was indeed a horrible crime for which the leaders should pay; even in war, there’s a duty to protect noncombatants. But the notion that the central government’s using force against rebels amounts to “seiz[ing] control of more than half the country” or “launch[ing] a campaign against the Muslim and Croat populations” is a bizarre revisionism at its worst. As I said only half jokingly at the time, Slobodan Milošević was Yugoslavia’s Abraham Lincoln, determined to preserve the union even if he had to kill tens of thousands of his countrymen to do it.
