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Moammar Gadhafi better watch his back. May is shaping up to be a terrible month to be a mass murderer.
First Navy SEALs took out Osama bin Laden. Now a 16-year pursuit has ended with the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. Rack up another one for the manhunters.
It's unclear what sort of security procedures Mladic adopted to evade capture. According to initial reports, they appear to have been mild: he hid out in northern Serbia under the name Milorad Komadic. Nor were sophisticated satellites, drones, cameras or sensors necessary to find him. Serbian forces arrested "Komadic" after "a tip that he had identification documents for Mladic and appeared physically similar." That fits a pattern established by Radovan Karadzic, who escaped justice for 13 years by growing a giant beard and assuming a radically new identity as an alternative medicine guru in suburban Belgrade.
Which begs the question: just how hard were the Serbs looking for their former military client? Indeed, just before Mladic's arrest, the United Nations war crimes prosecutor reported that Serbia's manhunt for Balkan war criminals, its "biggest obligation," have "not been sufficient." Of course, the fact that the Serbs themselves captured Mladic is the biggest difference with bin Laden's case, despite the tortured logic of the Pakistani military.
An international tribunal indicted Mladic and Karadzic in 1995 for crimes against humanity. From the rap sheet: "unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship." Serbia's president, Boris Tadij, pledged to extradite Mladic to the Hague for trial.
As a war correspondent, Samantha Power bore witness to Mladic's work in Bosnia. She described Mladic's actions in less clinical and legalistic terms. "I had worked in Sarajevo, where Serb snipers took target practice on bundled old ladies hauling canisters of filthy water across town and where picturesque parks had been transformed into cemeteries to accomodate the deluge of young arrivals. I had interviewed emaciated men who had dropped forty and fifty pounds and who bore permanent scars from their time in Serb concentration camps.... [And yet] it never dawned on me that General Mladic would or could systematically execute every last Muslim man and boy in his custody." She described herself as "haunted" by both her "own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world's refusal to intervene even once the men's peril had become obvious."
Today, Power is one of the most influential foreign policy advisers to the president of the United States and Ratko Mladic is in a holding cell. Power's experiences in the Balkans led her to support a new U.S.-NATO waragainst the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, another indicted war criminal. With the Libya conflict stalled, how long will it take before Gadhafi meets the same fate as Mladic -- or, for that matter, bin Laden?
Photo: Wikimedia
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