Mladic may be behind bars but his toxic ideas are still at large

A few years ago I attended a meeting of the ICC Trust Fund of Victims in The Hague. Unbeknown to me, the hotel I was staying in was near where the ICTY (war crimes tribunal) indictees were being held, and from where, each day — I was told — they shuttled to and from the courtroom.

After so many years I found myself in the vicinity of the very people who set out to destroy the country I was born in, Bosnia and Herzegovina — men who thrived on hate and killings.

I did not feel anger or pleasure in knowing that while I was at a meeting, they were in a courtroom. That I was free and they were not. This time they had no power. They could not inflict pain and sow death.

I remembered Bosnia in the war: my parents and my sisters, their children, who lived for years with little food, under a daily barrage of shelling, in fear that our home town could be the next in General Mladic’s sight. That would have only one certain outcome: a long siege, shelling, paramilitaries, men killed, women raped, a town overrun. A well-known pattern from towns like Foca, Zepa, Srebrenica.

I remembered this yesterday as Ratko Mladic, once “the General”, tried to command the courtroom like he once did a battlefield. But this time his threats were the empty rumblings of a pitiful old man. His conviction yesterday for war crimes, including genocide, will mean a lot to the families of his victims. It can’t bring them back but it does offer some closure for relatives.

The verdict also establishes an incontestable historical and legal recognition of what happened, in a region where many still deny the past. It reconfirms the facts about ethnic cleansing and massacres during the war and where responsibility lies.

But we must learn from what happened. Mladic and others carried out genocide and ethnic cleansing for an aim — to create an ethnically pure Serb state on the territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. There are people today still pursuing those war aims through political means, by threatening to break up the state along ethnic lines, by calling for a secession through a referendum on independence.

This would be a disaster. In other words, Mladic may be behind bars, but his ideas are not.

The most important lesson is that the international community should resist any suggestion that Bosnia’s borders are up for discussion. We should be clear that the only future for the country is as a unified, multi-ethnic democratic state on the road to membership of the EU and Nato.

That is the only road for Bosnia to take. Any talk of its break-up should be resisted. Anything else would be a recognition that genocide pays off.

Baroness Helic was a special adviser to William Hague when he was Foreign Secretary