Interesting how Radovan Karadzic is suddenly found after years in hiding, just as Serbia is struggling to join the EU and trying to overcome EU concerns about its past. If that doesn’t work, no doubt Mladic will be offered up next, coming surprisingly to official notice after years in supposed hiding.
So one or both of them will go to trial, but the people who harboured them all these years, at all levels of government and society, won’t.
If only Karadzic and Mladic had had the sense to be involved in something much nastier than simple massacres, like Japan’s Unit 731 which engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity of the worst kind, then after the war the vile bastards who ran it were protected by the Americans to get the advanced chemical and bacteriological knowledge the Americans thought they had, which they didn’t. There is a certain irony in one of the Unit 731 leaders going on to head a major pharmaceutical company in post-war Japan.
If only the political climate had changed for Karadzic, as it did after WWII when the West, primarily America, forgave all if you happened to be a sufficiently useful Nazi or Japanese who was rabidly anti-communist (which oddly enough was called fascism when the Axis powers did it but patriotism by the time McCarthy was scourging America for reds under the beds in what looked rather like a fascist crusade a few years after the war.). This allowed utter cunts like Tsuji Masanobu, who was largely responsible for some of the worst avoidable suffering, bestiality and murders preceding and during the Bataan Death March, to become a popularly elected politician in Japan seven years after the war ended (Thank you, Douglas MacArthur!), despite being a listed war criminal only a few years before he was elected.
Karadzic and Mladic probably are guilty of crimes against humanity, and war crimes if you want to classify that miserable episode as a war, as no doubt are many others on both sides who were more directly involved in criminal acts.
But if Bush can run the US which in accordance with his obsession about a war on terror runs a rendition program which kidnaps and tortures innocent people and has its most senior law officers pervert the meaning of torture to allow waterboarding and so on, not to mention illegally invading Iraq and events like Abu Ghraib, then why should Karadzic have to face trial for being involved in the killing of perhaps tens of thousands of people when Bush has thoroughly fucked Iraq and been responsible for many times more deaths than Karadzic, with no more legal or other justification? Perhaps less.
There is a great deal of selectivity in war crimes prosecutions, and in the manner in which defendants are discovered, which renders the whole process largely farcical and certainly unjust in any sense of parity of treatment of known offenders.
Not least because of the part that national politics plays in bringing offenders to what passes for justice, or protecting them from it.
