Mirnes Kovač
On March 24th, Radovan Karadzic’s sentence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague will be announced. It has been a long time coming. He had already stolen 13 years of his sentence at the time of his arrest in 2008! Today he is 71 and has additionally stolen eight years of his trial. But whatever the sentence turns out to be, the seed of the crime he committed is very much alive!
Following a protracted capture, we watched his trial for eight years. The ICTY was very careful to avoid any possible complaint about possibly hurting his “rights.” But, in reality, we all know, his case is like pedestal on which the killed beast is exposed to show to the village that the danger has gone. But has it?
Europe does not want to realize that the trial of Karadzic is to a degree a trial of itself. His verdict is also the verdict for Europe. For more than two decades Europe had difficulty even using the term Genocide in Srebrenica or Prijedor, as it was not happy to repeat the term Holocaust.
If it had not been for the indolent or even partial stance of Europe toward the Evildoer (from 1992 to 1995) the actions of the Evildoer would not had been possible at all. At the end of day, the crime and genocide did not happen somewhere remote like the North pole, but in very courtyard of Europe!
If the hesitation of Europe’s establishment did not produce the Evildoer, it did make the Evildoer possible. Today’s trial and tomorrow’s verdict must be about more than Karadzic. It must also be about his creation and legacy (the Serb Entity that was established in Bosnia and Herzegovina)!
No one in Bosnia expects any justice any more from Europe! The only hope of ours is to prevent any further injustice. Human and worldly dimensions are not able to weigh his crime, nor are the weights of justice able to balance its weight! The Evildoer is only the exponent of those who facilitated him to be what he is.
When the renowned British historian of the last century, A. J. P Taylor, challenged the “Nuremberg Thesis”—according to which all evils of this world and conflict were credited to Hitler and his gang—in his The Origins of the Second World War published fifteen years after the end of the Second World War, he was accused of revisionism, misinterpretation and more. His book opened many controversies and a long debate followed. But A. J. P Taylor was not some unknown radical fanatic, but a renowned and prominent scholar who smashed the all-accepted myth of directing the guilt for such a huge WWII criminal enterprise toward one person or his close group. He wrote:
“An explanation existed which satisfied everybody and seemed to exhaust all dispute. This explanation was: Hitler. He planned the Second World War. His will alone caused it. This explanation obviously satisfied the ‘resisters’ from Churchill to Namier. They had given it all along, were already giving it before the war broke out. They could say: ‘We told you so. There was no alternative to resisting Hitler from the first hour.’ The explanation also satisfied the ‘appeasers’. They could claim that appeasement was a wise, and would have been a successful, policy if it had not been for the unpredictable fact that Germany was in the grip of a madman. Most of all, this explanation satisfied the Germans, except for a few unrepentant Nazis. After the First World War, the Germans tried to shift the guilt from themselves to the Allies, or to make out that no one was guilty. It was a simpler operation to shift the guilt from the Germans to Hitler. He was safely dead. Hitler may have done a great deal of harm to Germany while he was alive. But he made up for it by his final sacrifice in the Bunker. No amount of posthumous guilt could injure him. The blame for everything – the Second World War, the concentration camps, the gas chambers – could be loaded on to his uncomplaining shoulders. With Hitler guilty, every other German could claim innocence; and the Germans, previously the most strenuous opponents of war-guilt, now became its firmest advocates” (A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, Touchsone, New York, 1961, pp. 11-12).
- J. P. Taylor’s approach can exactly be applied in the case of Radovan Karadzic. It seems from what we see now that most of the “establishment” of Europe looks at his “achievement” i.e. Republika Srpska (the Serb entity within Bosnia built on genocide and ethnic cleansing) with favour, since it allowed for Karadzic’s successor on the political scene in Bosnia to prise his work and political ideas most similar to those carried by the Nazis in Germany.
Yes, clearly and precisely, the trial and verdict in the Hague is a positive legal process which has to be done for the history record. But, can Europe even imagine a case in which war criminals, those responsible for the worst mass killings, dictate the flow of justice or even worse, that after they finish their sentences they return home in full glory and with state tribute? This was case of several war criminals (Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik) after they served two thirds of their terms and returned to Republika Srpska. The Serb establishment, with the president of this entity, Milorad Dodik, greeted these early-released war criminals. They were welcomed in Bosnia with the honours of national heroes. Isn’t this sending scary message for the future, not just for Bosnia, but for the whole Europe? Are we witnessing a new “appeasement” policy toward those who openly praise war criminals and their crimes?
In the ICTY trial of Radovan Karadzic and his war-time general Ratko Mladic, Europe, knowingly or not, judges its own “establishment” and its wrong policy of appeasement. They were unable to prevent the genocide in Srebrenica and Prijedor and wide range of other war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina before it was to late!
This policy enabled Radovan Karadzic and his gang, as it had once enabled Hitler, to lead his people into disaster. Now is the time to stop them going further. Now is the time to wake up and save the Serb people from falling into an even worse historical position than were the Germans prior to the Denazification process.
The Serb people have still not gone through any of it, and the highest priority of Europe, and together with us their neighbours, is to help them finally begin this difficult journey.
In short: the DENAZIFICATION of Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially the part that is designated as: “Republika Srpska” should be implemented. For, the seed of crime has not been eradicated yet! By the current European approach it was just put away, and the fear of its germination is only a matter of time.
Let us again repeat “Never again” with the hope and prayers that this time it will truly be “Never again!”
Mirnes Kovac is journalist and political analyst from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is author of recently published book “The Siege of Islam”, and regular columnist and commentator on Middle East and Balkans issues. He graduated from University of Sussex, Brighton. He lives and works in Sarajevo.