Bosnian news

Well, blow me down with a feather. There I am complaining that Bosnia never makes the news in the UK and when I listen to the news on Radio 4 last night (you have to love radio over the internet, the inside of our house sounds just as it did before we left the English shores) the second story was about Bosnia. It seems that the head of the Bosnian Serb army during the conflict here, Ratko Mladic, has been caught on video apparently as recently as last year and this video was aired on Bosnian TV on Wednesday night. Mladic was indicted on various war crimes and genocide charges and has been on the run for the last decade (reportedly in Serbia and rumoured to have been protected by the Serb state until recently).

This being the Balkans, nothing is as straightforward as it first seems. The timing of the release of the video coincides with two things. First the Bosnian Serbs had a June 11th deadline of complying with international community ultimatums which they then proceeded to ignore (more on this from my post earlier this week) and I don't find the release of a video of one of their previous leaders suggesting that the international community are getting closer to finding him entirely coincidental. Second, many believe that it is to put pressure on the country Serbia who are, with the election of a more Western inclined Prime Minister, to shortly have discussions about their route to EU membership. The apprehension of Radovan Karadzic in Belgrade last year by the Serbs (complete with beard, top knot and new career as an alternative medicine practitioner) was probably orchestrated with one eye on their EU credentials.

Either way there is nothing that the Bosnians love more than a good conspiracy theory and everyone is talking about it. Whether they will catch him and whether the war crimes tribunals in The Hague will deliver effective justice is a totally different story