Boris Tadic, the Serb president, deserves praise for the arrest of Dr. Karadzic, said The Times of London in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
Richard Holbrooke, the former American Ambassador to the UN, remarked yesterday: “One of the worst men in the world, the Osama Bin Laden of Europe, has finally been captured.” As a description of Radovan Karadzic, that is no hyperbole.
Between the declaration of independence in 1992 and the Dayton peace accord that Holbrooke brokered in 1995, Bosnia suffered a campaign of xenophobic savagery by Bosnian Serb forces. Thousands of women were raped. Camps at Omarska, Susica and elsewhere became bywords for beatings, torture and murder. Some 200,000 people were killed, most of them Muslims. In the most horrific act of this war of aggression, 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred at Srebrenica.
The agents of this catastrophe were led by Dr. Karadzic, and were under the military command of Ratko Mladic. For 13 years, these men have escaped capture. The evil that men do lives after them, but the arrest of Dr. Karadzic is a moment of catharsis. It brings nearer a belated historical accounting for appalling crimes. It advances Serbia’s place in the family of European nations. It is a notable moment for the values on which Europe is founded, and which were so traduced by the Bosnian Serbs and their Svengali, the late Slobodan Milosevic. Boris Tadic, the Serb President, deserves praise for the arrest of Dr. Karadzic. There can be little doubt that one factor that emboldened Tadic in withstanding domestic opposition was the stand of the European Union.
