The Serb psyche

The arrest of Radko Mladic, charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, after more than 15 years on the run, will bring Serbia’s membership of the European Union closer. But it will do nothing to help ameliorate the wounded psyche of the Serbian people. Nobody disputes the unspeakable crimes that were committed in the process of Yugoslavia’s breakup.

The Serbs, as the dominant party, were more to blame than others, but the Western decision to paint them as the bad boys, almost to the exclusion of other parties, rankles in the Serb consciousness.
The Serbs suffered 11 weeks of Nato bombing raids in March-June 1999. During a visit to Belgrade and other towns after the bombing I saw the scale of the destruction, with prominent buildings in central Belgrade little more than charred ruins, retained as reminders of a tragic past. Finally, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic had to surrender. Richard Holbrooke of the United States had used him at Dayton to hammer out the agreement on Bosnia-Herzegovina. But there was little doubt that the Serbian leader was a marked man when the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was constituted.
After Slobodan Milosevic was dethroned by a popular movement in which students under the rubric of Otpor (resistance) played a prominent part, Belgrade came under increasing pressure from The Hague to deliver Milosevic, Milovan Karadzic and Mladic if Serbia had any hope of receiving approval for joining the queue for European Union membership. Talking to political leaders of several parties and ordinary Serbs in Belgrade after the Nato bombing, I found them united in the belief that the West, in the shape of the International Court, was out to get Serbs, rather than any of the other parties to the conflict.
Besides, the fact that the Albanian-majority Serbian province of Kosovo was placed under international tutelage with the intention of detaching it from Serbia led to charges and counter-charges in Belgrade of “who lost Kosovo?” The subsequent unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo, quickly recognised by the United States and most of the West, came after years of make-believe UN investigations. Serbs’ cradle of culture and Orthodox Christian religion is well recognised to lie in Kosovo.
The Serbian government of Zoran Djindic bit the bullet and handed Milosevic to The Hague, where he outsmarted his prosecutors, in a sense, to conduct his own defence, watched by a television audience of millions to make his points. He died in prison before he could be pronounced guilty. Djindic paid for sending Milosevic to The Hague with his own life, at the hands of an assassin. The Hague prosecutors kept up their drumbeat on Belgrade to hand over the other two prominent accused. Finally, Radovan Karadzic, living under disguise, was discovered and handed over. He has since been conducting his own defence after resuming his original avatar of a scholarly air and long mane.
But the big catch, Mladic, charged with the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys in Srebrenica, ostensibly protected by Dutch troops wearing UN helmets, still eluded capture, obviously protected by his army loyalists. His luck finally ran out and President Boris Tadic made the dramatic announcement on May 26 of his capture, with promise of bringing him before a Serbian court prior to his dispatch to The Hague. This can only confirm the popular Serbian belief that the International Court, propped up by the US and the West, is biased against them. Indeed, remarkably few Croats or Bosniaks have been hauled before the Hague court, much less convicted. Among the few high-profile Croats found guilty, Gen. Ante Golovina and his co-accused, a police chief, caused fury in Croatia. Indeed, the general was on the run for four years until finally tracked to a restaurant in Tenerife. Unlike on Serbs, there was no international outcry on the Croats’ role in the grisly process of Yugoslavia’s breakup.
The Serbian establishment decided after the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic that belonging to the European Union was the only game on the continent and it was prepared to pay the price for it. But during my visits to Yugoslavia in the 1990s it was clear the federation was suffering death pangs after the Tito era’s end. The Serbs felt let down by the West and the world as they believed they had got a raw deal. As a pillar of nonalignment, Marshal Tito had played an important role in seeking independence from Moscow. As Yugoslavia broke up bit by cruel bit, the political tide in the establishment had swung and policymakers were willing to play a subservient role to seek favours from the West.
Will Mladic’s arrest bring some sort of closure to the Serbs’ sense of hurt in being singled out for American and Western retributive justice? It seems unlikely because while many Serbs in policymaking positions feel that as the reduced nation of Serbia, they have no option but to accept their fate, having been let down by their own leaders to be confronted by the might of important nations. But the wounds of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the tragedies it brought in its wake will not heal soon. The European Union is the only goal they can now aspire to.
Yugoslavia’s fate has lessons for Europe and the world. As a multi-ethnic nation, it is dangerous for a dominant community to play the game of one-upmanship. Tito’s genius in bringing the diverse republics together was to depress Serbian representation while choosing Communism as a cement to keep the federation intact. It would have been hard for successors to replicate the successful formula after the fall of European Communism. Milosevic made such an attempt impossible by suppressing ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo. But the biggest lesson of all is that a small nation cannot survive if powerful countries gang up against it.