The day started out looking bad for the Balkans, with the Serbian president boycotting a meeting with Barack Obama in Poland because the Kosovo president was attending. But things look rather better now. After a decade-long man-hunt, Serbian police arrested Ratko Mladic in northern Serbia. He was living under the name Milorad Komadic and had grown a beard like his former boss, Radovan Karadzic. A plane carrying Mladic is said to have left for The Hague, where he will soon be arraigned before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Foreign Secretary William Hague has rightly called the arrest a “historic moment” for the western Balkans. General Mladic is accused of orchestrating the methodical slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslims from the Bosnian “safe area” of Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since World War Two.
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