Two decades on

Recent history is the most difficult to write about the memory is still raw,the wounds havent healed,there isnt sufficient distance from the event. All the more so when the story is war and genocide. Understanding the butchery of the Yugoslav Wars 1991-95 cannot be anywhere complete yet; it was doubly impossible so long as men like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were at large. Karadzic was caught and handed over to The Hague in 2008. On Thursday,Serbia confirmed the arrest of Mladic,the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces,civilian Karadzics military twin and partner in mass murder. This certainly marks a closure for Bosnians and many Serbians,albeit symbolic. Goran Hadzic,leader of the Serb insurgents in Croatia,still remains at large.

Mladic is responsible for Srebrenica the man who ordered his troops to massacre 7,500 Bosniak Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995,culminating in the worst single incident of genocide since World War II. For 16 years,he was on the run; initially living openly and comfortably under the protective eye of Slobodan Milosevic,the late former president of Yugoslavia and then Serbia. However,Milosevics arrest in 2001 forced Mladic to hide with sympathy for him still running deep among some Serbs,he had held out till now. Health permitting,he will soon join Karadzic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for trial.

Questions have been raised about the timing of the arrest announced the very day EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security,Catherine Ashton,landed in Belgrade to pull Serbia up for foot-dragging. Under its current pro-Western government,Serbia is keen to join the EU,but cannot till all war criminals are caught. Charged with 15 counts of genocide and crimes against humanity,Mladic was long overdue.