The collapse of the Yugoslav Federation into warfare led to actions of bestiality on all sides. However the prime movers were the Serbs who sought to maintain Belgrade’s power over Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia with utter ruthlessness.
The ouster of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic freed the Serbs from the regime which had ordered and condoned the barbarities committed in particular by bloodthirsty militiamen who were allowed the run of Serb-controlled areas and behaved with utmost depravity, murdering and raping innocent civilians simply because they were not ethnic Serbs.
Repulsed as many ordinary citizens may have been by the revelations about the evil committed by their fellow-countrymen in the name of a Greater Serbia, the harsh fact is that in Serbia, as in Germany after the defeat of Hitler’s Nazis, there is a collective guilt that must be expiated by the capture and trial of all Serbs suspected of wicked crimes against their former neighbors.
Two years ago Serbia established its own war crimes court. The first prosecution took place last March when six low-level Serb paramilitaries went on trial accused of butchering 200 Croats, many of them wounded soldiers captured in a Vukovar hospital when the eastern Croatian town fell to the Serb Army after a stubborn defense by Croat forces. The trial mirrored that of three senior Serb commanders indicted at The Hague.
Now the Serbian authorities have announced the arrest of six more suspects. However, perhaps because they are still seeking three further wanted men, they initially refused to name those detained. All these men will face trial in the special Belgrade court. The prosecutions will be mounted with the help of officials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, based on investigations that reportedly began last October.
It must be hoped that this demonstration of cooperation with The Hague investigators marks a new beginning. The Serb authorities have often in the past been reluctant to work in a close and timely manner with The Hague. The key arrests and prosecutions remain those of Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military henchman Ratko Mladic. There appears justified suspicion that both men have been sheltered in Serbia and that local investigators have been less than zealous in helping international investigators run them to ground.
Until these men are captured and brought to trial in The Hague, the shadow of guilt will hang over all Serbia. Nationalists, depressed by the humiliations and defeat suffered by their country as a result of the aggressive policies of the Milosevic regime may feel that sheltering these men is a way of snubbing the international community. However what they have to understand is that by protecting Karadzic and Mladic, they are in fact sullying the name of the country in which they take such pride and actually debasing their patriotism.
It might persuade Serbs that they were not being singled out for specific humiliation if the Croat authorities took decisive action to arrest one of their own former top commanders, Gen. Ante Gotovina, who is also with the two Bosnian-Serbs at the top of The Hague tribunal’s most wanted list.
These trials are not about politics — they are about dreadful crimes committed in an apparently civilized part of Europe. It is the victims, the dead, the orphans and the widows who must see the criminals caught and punished, regardless of faith and country. Without the closure of justice, the Balkans’ wounds will not heal.
