The arrest of a Bosnian war leader threatens to reopen deep wounds in the Balkans

THE timing could not have been more inauspicious. Radovan Karadzic who had escaped arrest for alleged war crimes for so long had just begun his testimony at the UN’s war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Monday March 1st. The Serbian struggle during the Bosnian war of 1992-95, including the bloody siege of Sarajevo, had been “holy and just” he claimed. At about the same moment British police arrested, at the request of the Serbian government, a wartime Bosnian-Muslim (Bosniak) leader, Ejup Ganic. He was intercepted at London’s Heathrow airport.

As the Bosnian war erupted in April 1992, Ejup Ganic was a member of the country’s collective presidency. Bosnia had declared independence from the Serb-led former Yugoslavia and the Serbian siege of Sarajevo had begun. On the hills around the city Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander, ordered his men to fire indiscriminately into Sarajevo. Unlike Mr Karadzic, he still evades arrest and is believed to be hiding in Serbia. Yugoslav army soldiers still within Sarajevo were besieged. They then captured Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegovic, and his daughter. …