Psychotic Serbo-philia

Ed Vulliamy

Published in Dani, issue 664, March 5th, 2010.

On the very day we have to listen to Radovan Karadzic - who rightly regarded the British government as a friend during the years 1992-95 - deliver his demented justification for the worst mass-murder in Europe since the Nazis, the British decide to apprehend one of the leaders of the resistance to Karadzic, for delivery to Belgrade, where Karadzic himself was protected for 13 years, on the run from an international indictment.

Our primary and urgent concern must be for Mr Ganic, who has been arrested and is now detained without bail in Britain on the basis of a spurious indictment drawn up by the authorities in Belgrade even now unable to shake off their ultra-nationalist psychosis and begin to reckon with their own vile history. And with Mr Ganic's liberty and rights under rational - not politically didactic and contrived - law. Our second concern should be with what this development tells us about the international community's deluded view of Serbia, as some kind of legitimate member of the international community worthy of admission to the European Union. This is still the country which shields and protects the indicted mass-murderer Ratko Mladic - as a national treasure and hero - while demanding Ejup Ganic!? One doesn't know whether to laugh or cry; what one does know, however, is that this is the same old rabid, deranged Serbia, to which the diplomats have wittingly blinkered themselves, just as they did during the war, and which Britain seems determined to appease. Our third concern must be with what this latest waltz between London and Belgrade - and it is hardly the first - does to undermine the cause of universal justice. Many people in the community of normal democratic nations (among which neither Serbia nor Britain can sadly count themselves) are trying to establish a zeitgeist whereby people such as the late dictator Augusto Pinochet or war criminals from Israel or Central Africa can be arrested in countries other than their own. What Serbia and Britain have done with this appalling episode is to mock this effort: a bar-room grudge scribbled down by genocidal zealots in order to try and rewrite their own history is not an indictment. I am now waiting for Belgrade to start bleating that its "indictment" of Mr Ganic is in some way measurable alongside those against Messrs Karadzic and Mladic. One cannot help wondering if these people crazy, or just pretending to be crazy.

Britain, along with France, did more than any other country between 1992 and 1995 to appease the Serbian genocide machine - and to encourage it by making sure that it was un-harrassed by the during the pogrom to obliterate Bosnia's Muslims, for three long, bloody years. Stories of close liasons and sleazy deals between senior members of John Major's decadent government and the regime and person of Slobodan MIlosevic are legend. Now, nearly two decades later, London still cannot lay this psychotic Serbo-philia to rest, yet again pandering to Belgrade, and this time delivering Mr Ganic for judgement in the insane asylum. It is grotesque, it is politically and morally repugnant, and it undermines the cause of international justice.