Mladic’s capture gives Serbia the chance to exorcise its ghosts

He now faces extradition to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, where he will be charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for the massacre of Muslims by his Bosnian Serb forces in eastern Bosnia, and for the relentless four-year siege of Sarajevo.

Despite his son Darko’s insistence that his father was too ill to make the journey to The Hague, a Belgrade court ruled that he was fit to be extradited. The family have appealed and the court will make a final decision this week.

For thousands of Bosnian Muslims whose families were his victims, there was a powerful sense that justice might now be done.

“Mladic is responsible for the death of my son, husband and two brothers, but nevertheless he was at large for more than 15 years,” said Kada Sehomerovic. “I have been waiting for years for this criminal, who gave himself the right to take away my children and force me out of my town, to face justice.”

For those who lived through those dreadful days, there was an equally compelling sense that never again should this be allowed to happen. Sonja Biserko, head of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, said the arrest was an opportunity for Serbs to remember their role in wartime crimes.

“I want to see this as a real moment of facing our past. This is extremely important, particularly for the sake of our young people, who have to know what happened in the past, and why it happened.”

But some had a grim feeling that it was all a bit too tidy. The modern Serbia which arose from the ashes of the civil war is currently being assessed for membership of the European Union – its application stood or fell on the requirement to bring Mladic to justice.

In the aftermath of the arrest, the EU foreign policy commissioner, Catherine Ashton, said Serbia’s application for membership would be handled “with renewed energy”, while colleagues said an important obstacle had been removed.

The EU special representative to Bosnia, Valentin Inzko, said: “I think this is a great step for Serbia. I would say that Serbia can expect now reaction from Brussels.”

Mladic had been on the run since 2002, after a $5 million reward was put on his head. By any standards the operation to find him should have been easy; there should have been no hiding place for the renegade – Bosnia is a small place and the general was hardly unknown.

But for the last 10 years Mladic was untouchable. He was seen regularly at football matches and family weddings and received medical attention in Belgrade following a reported stroke. The opinion throughout the region was “everyone knew where he was hiding”.

Even when former Bosnian leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested in 2008 – he had been living under a new identity as a faith healer – Mladic remained on the run. Despite the reward, Serbs still protected him and there remained suspicions that although a moderate government had been elected in Belgrade under President Boris Tadic, the former general’s position was secure.

Considering the fierce tribal loyalties binding Serbs together, it came as no surprise when Mladic was eventually found living in Lazarevo, a village in northern Bosnia dominated by traditionalist Serbs who regard the general as a national hero. Tadic’s government has promised to prosecute anyone found to have helped him – as one EU official put it: “It wasn’t like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

That may be so, but much has happened between Mladic’s disappearance and his arrest last week. Milosevic’s dream of a Greater Serbia is dead – modern Serbia is a democratically elected state which has made substantial progress under Tadic. The time had come to exorcise the ghosts of the past. When he announced the arrest last week, Tadic said he wanted to close “a chapter of our recent history that will bring us one step closer to full reconciliation in the region”.

Ratko Mladic was born in 1942 in what was the short-lived Independent State of Croatia, which was in league with Nazi Germany. Three years later, his father, a communist, was killed in a gun battle with rival Croatian partisans.

Having become a career soldier in the Yugoslav army, young Mladic became obsessed with his country’s history and embraced a hatred of the Muslim population, characterising them as “Turks” – a reference to the 500-year rule of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, which came to an end after the first world war.

It became his ambition to expel or exterminate all Muslims from his country – his chance came in 1991 with the dissolution of the Yugoslav federation and the outbreak of civil war, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

With Karadjic’s support, Mladic spent the next three years attempting to drive out the Muslim population in a doomed quest to create a Greater Serbia. The term “ethnic cleansing” suddenly came into being as thousands of Bosnian Muslims were simply butchered.

Mladic always took a leading role on the front line, first and foremost in the siege of Sarajevo, which began in 1992 and lasted four years. Around 10,000 people were killed as the city was subjected to artillery and mortar fire while Serb snipers kept the inhabitants in fear of their lives any time they left their homes. Referring to Sarajevo’s role in starting the first world war, historian Misha Glenny said of the situation: “Sarajevo in 1992 was merely a novel form of the tinderbox that had sparked war in 1914.”

This is one of the war crimes for which Mladic will be indicted, but he will always be most associated with the events at Srebrenica in the summer of 1995.

In the summer of 1995, as Serb forces attempted to grab Muslim areas in their drive to claim the bulk of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s territory, they were faced with resistance in the Muslim-dominated towns of Tuzla, Gorazde and Srebrenica. But Mladic possessed greater firepower and a relentless capacity to prosecute his campaign without any mercy. This was particularly true at Srebrenica, where Muslim fighters had surrendered their weapons to UN forces and had placed themselves under the protection of a Dutch infantry battalion.

This gave Mladic an opportunity. Entering Srebrenica, he summoned the Dutch commander and demanded the surrender of the Muslims. Women were separated from the men and in a chilling piece of theatricality, Mladic moved among the boys giving them sweets and promising that they were safe.

Days later, on July 13, the first killings of unarmed Muslims took place in a warehouse in the nearby village of Kravica. Three days later, the Dutch battalion moved out of Srebrenica and the way was open for Bosnian Serb forces to overrun the town and to complete the slaughter. By July 21, more than 8000 Muslim men and boys are thought to have been killed. Mladic had got his way and the incident came to symbolise the West’s helplessness in the face of genocide being practised in a country that was supposed to be part of civilised Europe.

Small wonder that Conservative MP Colonel Bob Stewart’s voice was still shaking with anger when he received the news of Mladic’s arrest last week. Twenty years ago he commanded 1st Cheshire Regiment, one of the UN peacekeeping forces, and he witnessed the violence perpetrated by Mladic’s Serb militias.

He said: “It is very, very important that Mladic is brought to The Hague quickly, the trial starts quickly, the trial is expeditious in dealing with the matter and … justice prevails. I saw the result of what this man did. I saw murdered men, women and children. I saw what was happening in Srebrenica.”

In the end, Mladic was brought to justice not just because of the world’s horror at what he did, but also because life has moved on and his country is no longer run by nationalists who dream of a Greater Serbia.

Mladic was a dinosaur from an almost unimaginable past, a relic who stood in the way of modern Serbia’s need to become part of a European hegemony which provides vital economic, political and cultural bonds. Put simply, he was no longer worth protecting.