The blocked extradition of Ejup Ganić for war crimes shows that Serbia is still viewed by many as the black sheep of Europe
While Serbia may no longer be the pariah of Europe, given the manifold attempts its current government has made to mend fences with its neighbours and other European nations in recent years, it still appears to be something of a black sheep if the rather dismissive verdict against its request for the extradition of former Bosnian president Ejup Ganić is anything to go by.
When Ganić was arrested at Heathrow airport in March, after Serbia brought charges against him relating to an attack on Yugoslav army troops in Sarajevo in 1992, which left several dead, some voices cried foul and insisted that a "deep-rooted" Serbophilia was at work in the UK. Given that Ganić's supporters have expressed themselves as being "satisfied" with the ultimate outcome, surely we can now put such spurious claims to bed.
Having been resident in Belgrade for over two years, while making fairly frequent trips back to the UK, I can argue with some confidence that not only is UK-based Serbophilia not at all "deep-rooted", it would have considerable trouble getting off the ground in the first place given that so many British citizens struggle to even find Serbia on the map. Indeed, this suggests, if anything, that something of a residual phobia exists in the UK in relation to the Balkan country given the savage events of the 1990s.
The presiding district judge in the case, Timothy Workman, ruled that the allegations made against Ganić by Serbian war crimes prosecutors were in all likelihood the result of "political" motivations at work. This conveniently ignored the fact that "politics" has informed pretty much every trial involving war crimes since they first became a matter for international courts.
Weren't even the Nuremberg trials over-loaded with political considerations? Of course they were, and there was no harm in it either. One of the key purposes of hearing evidence against Goering et al and then executing them for their murderous deeds, was, after all, to kickstart a process of denazification not only in Germany but by implication in the rest of Europe as well.
The very definition of "war criminal" has been up for grabs since Nuremberg and has been laden with political slant with every passing relevant controversy. The US president LB Johnson was considered one by anti-Vietnam war protesters during the 1960s, with their chant "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!" ringing loudly through history to this very day. Even the eminently charming Tony Blair has been labelled a war criminal by those at the receiving end of his policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and, yes, Serbia.
Judge Workman walked a treacherous tightrope during his summation when he dismissed the notion that the Serbian war prosecutors had been "incompetent", while at the same time suggesting that they had allowed "political" matters to cloud their judgment when making the application for Ganić's extradition. One would have thought that any lawyer permitting his or her ideological passions to get in the way of the legal process would not really be doing their job very competently.
As things stand, the case against Ganić will not be heard, so we are not in a position to judge his innocence or otherwise during the events in Sarajevo in May 1992. But we can ask one pertinent question: will Serbia – which has been harangued from all sides because of the slaughter in its name during the 1990s wars – ever be granted proper redress for the crimes its people also suffered at the time of these horrific conflicts?
Since being elected in 2008 in the face of radical rightwing opposition, Serbia's liberal coalition government has done its utmost to repair the damaged reputation it suffered during Slobodan Milošević's reign. Its handling of the arrest of Radovan Karadžić in Belgrade in 2008 in the face of aroused passions and violence was both cool-headed and, yes, about as apolitical as you could expect in the circumstances. No one, aside from the local nationalists, censured Serbia's war crime prosecutors for any political bias they may have harboured.
One simple observation during that heady time largely went unremarked upon by the western media. It was that the man who held up the picture of Karadžić, alias Dr Dragan Dabić, thus sending shockwaves across the world, was Rasim Ljajić, president of Serbia's National Council for Co-operation with the Hague Tribunal. Ljajić is a Muslim, a Bosniak, and a symbol of Serbia's new dawn where tolerance is by the day overpowering ignorance and the brutality of the recent past. But no one in the UK seemed to be particularly bothered by that fact in the summer of 2008. So much, then, for Serbophilia. The phobia, however, is still alive and well.
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