Chandler Rosenberger on National Review Online

So where was Radovan Karadzic all this time? Karadzic was arrested on a bus Monday afternoon in Belgrade, where, behind the cunning disguise of a long white beard, he had been practicing alternative medicine — an apparent career change from his previous occupations as sports psychologist and, later, as murderous president of the Bosnian Serb Republic.

Karadzic had never been too hard to find. In 1996 the BBC’s Robin Lustig drove to the gates of his home in suburban Belgrade and requested an interview. There were florid tales of how Karadzic, like some hero of an epic poem, had donned the cassock of an Orthodox monk and had scurried from monastery to monastery. But the truth turned out to be more mundane. We now know that Karadzic was a brutal thug who had lived rather openly in a country that had grown weary of suffering for his crimes.

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It has taken too long, but there are important lessons in how Karadzic was finally captured. In the twelve years since the Dayton Peace Accords forced Karadzic from power, Serbia’s options on the international stage have gradually narrowed. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both deserve credit for promoting democracy in Serbia while limiting the options successive Serbian governments. This often required forcing the Serbs to face hard truths. It also required standing up to Serbia’s powerful would-be patrons, especially Russia, whenever they suggested that Belgrade might negotiate an easy way out.

The track record is clear: Every time the U.S. stood firmly against Serbia’s ultranationalists and its apologists abroad, it destabilized Belgrade’s recalcitrant regimes. Tragically, this is a lesson that American administrations took too long to learn.

In 1991, when Serbia began attacking other Yugoslav republics that sought independence, the first Bush administration dithered, imposing an arms embargo on the entire former Yugoslavia. This half-hearted quest for “stability” ultimately helped only those who already had guns — Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army. Candidate Bill Clinton decried the “butchers of Belgrade,” but President Clinton maintained the embargo, fiddling with European schemes to partition Bosnia into Swiss-style cantons. Meanwhile Milosevic’s allies carved out their own blood-soaked fiefdom.

When I interviewed Radovan Karadzic in 1993, he sat comfortably in a country home in the hillside town of Pale. From there he could see watch his soldiers strangle Sarajevo. Karadzic spun his tawdry conspiracy theories: the U.S. only complained about the treatment of Bosnia’s Muslims, he opined, because it wanted to curry favor with the oil oligarchies of the Middle East. But Karadzic himself seemed bored with these justifications, and why shouldn’t he have been? He had already repeated them ad nauseam in comfortable Swiss hotels where international negotiators had pleaded for his compliance. He had nothing to fear and thus no case to make. “We know you are not going to bomb,” he told me.

At the time Karadzic’s forces had surrounded enclaves of ethnic Muslims in Eastern Bosnia that the United Nations had declared “safe havens.” In July 1995 the Serbs finally put an end this charade, capturing the blue-helmeted peacekeepers as hostages and rounding up all able-bodied Bosnian Muslim men. Over the next month these 8,300 men were executed by dozens and hundreds at a time — lined up along riverbanks and shot from behind; hoarded into warehouses and killed with machine guns and hand grenades; held prisoner in school gymnasiums until bulldozers could finish digging their mass graves.

After the Srebrenica massacre the U.S. set a new course, one that saved lives and forced changes in Serbian politics. In August 1995 Clinton finally lifted the arms embargo and unleashed NATO air strikes, bombing the Serbs to the bargaining table. For the first time, Milosevic looked weak. Serbia noticed. The following year Serbs protested Milosevic’s annulment of local elections. After three months of mass demonstrations, Milosevic handed Belgrade over to its first non-Communist mayor in 50 years.

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