Justice Stirs in the Balkans

The Balkans are a region whose people do not forget. Wrongs are chronicled through the generations. Just the mention of a name can evoke the bitterest of memories. Srebrenica is one of those names that will be so remembered.

The arrest by American troops of Bosnian Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic on Wednesday has brought the horrors of Srebrenica back into focus. It was there in the late summer of 1995 that the Drina Corps, under Krstic’s command, allegedly committed a massacre that stands among the worst in the modern history of genocide. In what had been designated a U.N. safe area, Drina Corps troops routed an estimated 7,000 Muslim men and boys from their homes and marched them off to the countryside. The evidence of mass graves was found later.

Complaints that NATO forces have not moved promptly to arrest accused Bosnian war criminals and send them to the international tribunal at The Hague should be answered in part by Krstic’s arrest. He is the ninth person arrested for war crimes in the upheavals of the former Yugoslavia. Bigger fish remain at large, primarily Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic.

As arrests have gone higher up the chain of Serbian command, the finger has pointed with increasing evidence to the man who lit this fuse, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic. His will be the name that history marks as the instigator of violence.

The American and European NATO commands in Bosnia-Herzegovina moved gingerly at first on the issue of war criminals, for sound political reasons. Now, as the Yugoslav focus has shifted to Serbia’s conflict with its restive province of Kosovo, the Bosnian tragedy has slipped toward the shadows. The arrest of Krstic will change that focus and is proof that justice still awaits.