Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Victor Peskin, Serbia’s tipping-point arrest, open Democracy, July 22, 2008

Each year since the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, the anniversary underscores the failure to apprehend its two alleged architects, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Days after the thirteenth commemoration of the murder of around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries, there was a break in this particular cloud: namely, the arrest late on 21 July 2008 of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, found to have been living in Belgrade.

The news of Karadzic’s detention is stunning enough (see Dejan Djokic, “Radovan Karadzic’s capture: a moment for history”, 22 July 2008). What makes it even more timely and important is that it reinforces the signal sent a week earlier, on 14 July, by an application for an arrest-warrant against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on the charge of war-crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur (see “The Omar al-Bashir indictment, the ICC and Darfur”, 15 July 2008). The respective bodies seeking the opportunity to try al-Bashir and Karadzic may be different - the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) respectively - but taken together, these initiatives highlight the centrality of transnational justice institutions and processes to conflict- and post-conflict situations in different parts of the world.

The wrong climate

Radovan Karadzic is being held at the special court building in Belgrade, where he awaits transfer to the ICTY in The Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes: a series of atrocities that one tribunal judge famously said were “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. Since the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody in The Hague in March 2006, the importance of Karadzic and Mladic (the former Bosnian Serb military commander) to the tribunal’s mission has grown; the other outstanding suspect, Goran Hadzic, is regarded as a less important if also heinous figure. Now, the upcoming trial of Karadzic will give the ICTY a chance to redeem itself after the missteps of Milosevic’s unsatisfactory and in the end truncated four-year trial.