Mladic arrest: Has the West now learned not to be impartial on war crimes?

“I don’t curse anyone,” Kada Hotic told me, “not even those who caused me this pain.” In July 1995, Kada lost every grown male in her family to a massacre in the Bosnian mountain town of Srebrenica. She turned that pain into action, founding a large women’s association advocating for survivors’ rights. Almost 16 years later, she’s seeing partial justice. Yesterday, the man accused of masterminding that atrocity was arrested in neighboring Serbia.

Ratko Mladic commanded the army of Republika Srpska and led the units that surrounded Srebrenica that summer. Famous footage shows him overseeing the separation of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly from men and boys. The first group was transported to Bosniak-held territory and reassured that the others would only be held for questioning. Within days, 8,000 men and boys had been killed.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted Mladic on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. International law assures a victim’s right to justice, and Kada was clear on the kind she wanted: The chief perpetrators should be captured and arrested, but their lives spared. She simply wanted to hear them admit their guilt. “We don’t have to love each other, just respect each other’s rights.” But in Bosnia, justice was sacrificed to neutrality by an international community ambivalent – first about intervention to stop the bloodshed, and second about whether to pursue the perpetrators.

My 18 years of involvement in Balkan affairs started during my tenure as US ambassador to Austria, where we housed the US mission to Bosnia until Sarajevo, under siege, was deemed safe enough for an embassy. We hosted negotiations that led to a Bosniak-Croat Federation; conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with politicians, journalists, activists, and a host of other citizens, including refugees; and organized three international symposia of policymakers.

The problem with impartiality

Throughout, I was struck by the extent to which outsiders were using the principle of impartiality to distance themselves from responsibility.

Impartiality has been a fundamental principle of peacekeeping since the 1950s. Peacekeepers were to show no preference among warring sides – a kind of neutrality. Interpretation evolved from intervention to intervention, and “evenhandedness” was the catch-word when the Dayton Accords ended the war in late 1995.

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