Blood was boiling in the July heat of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1995. Ratko Mladic, a Serbian commander, had ordered the mass murder of 8,000 Bosniak Muslims. It was the first genocide of its kind since World War II.
Now, we are brought back to those memories by Mladic's pending trial for war crimes in The Hague. Unfortunately, though, justice for Mladic was delayed by his lawyer's tactics. Milos Saljic, Mladic's lawyer, confessed today that he mailed in an appeal at 5:30 AM to postpone the general's departure from Belgrade.
Saljic, however, isn't the only fan of Mladic. Thousands of supporters of the right-wing Serbian Radical Party (SRS), hailing General Mladic as a hero, are rioting in reaction to Mladic's tribunal. The SRS believes that Gen. Mladic was a war hero, and much of their protest is tied to nationalism. They even compare him to King Lazar, widely considered a Serbian martyr who fought the Ottoman Empire in 1389. The SRS also indicts the legitimacy of the International Criminal Tribual for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), where Mladic will be tried.
So this brings us to a question of nationalism vs. universal human rights.
I could understand why national sovereignty occasionally trumps international law. Sometimes, international laws are designed by certain countries to benefit those countries (for example, the United Staets and many Western European countries).
In this case, however, there is no nationalist justification for refusing to try Mladic. He is responsible for ethnic cleansing, which, under any interpretation of human rights is wrong. Even consequentialists would agree that it's wrong, because it deters other nations from seeing the ethnic cleanser kindly and does more harm than good.
Some authors, like Ian Buruma, have been making the argument that Mladic's ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica wasn't technically genocide. That is semantics. Even if his ethnic cleansing wasn't large enough in scale to be considered a genocide, it should still be punished.
We should not let perpetrators of mass murder get away with their crimes, regardless of the patriotic or nationalist implications.
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