While it’s good to see that one of the last major war criminals from the Bosnian wars of the 1990s has been arrested, my inner cynic wonders whether the Serb government knew his whereabouts and pulled the plug on Radko Mladic because it desperately wants entry into the European Union and the suspicion that it was harboring the man was a major impediment to that outcome. My inner realist says “So what? He’s finally in custody.”

While there was plenty of blame to go around in the wars which began following Yugoslavia’s breakup, it always seemed to me that Serbia bore more responsibility than either Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was Serbian President Milosevic’s speech at Kosovo in 1989 which seemed to foretell armed conflict. Once the wars began, Serbs Radovan Karadzic and Mladic took up the cause with horrific results at Srebrenica and Sarajevo.

With Mladic’s arrest both those men will have to answer for their crimes at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Good.