A hard-line ideological nationalist, Kostunica sympathised with Karadzic at multiple levels and sheltered him from arrest despite the cost to Serbia’s international standing. The new Serbian government under Mirko Cvetkovic is, by contrast, keen to mend its fences with the West; for all the stories that Karadzic could not be found, the Serbian security forces found him quickly enough when the government wanted them to.
The readiness of Kostunica and other Serbian nationalists to shield Karadzic was not simply a matter of ideological sympathy. The Bosnian Serb leadership under Karadzic and Mladic formed one of the principal links, during the first half of the 1990s, between Milosevic’s regime in Serbia and the bloodshed that was taking place in Bosnia. Consequently, Karadzic and Mladic are uniquely placed to spill the beans about Serbia’s responsibility for the Bosnia war and its complicity in Bosnian war crimes. This could even potentially jeopardise Serbia’s acquittal last year of genocide by the International Court of Justice.
In this respect, Karadzic may be a less significant figure than the still-fugitive Ratko Mladic. As a military figure, allegedly on the Yugoslav army’s payroll right up to the end of the Bosnian war, Mladic would know exactly the nature, extent and details of the Yugoslav army’s involvement in the Srebrenica massacre. Momcilo Perisic, Yugoslav army chief of staff at the time of Srebrenica, is awaiting trial at The Hague for his involvement in war crimes, including the Srebrenica massacre. Mladic co-operated with Perisic at the time of the massacre, but the degree of this co-operation is disputed. According to a Serbian journalist and anti-nationalist activist I spoke to, it is this – the exceptionally sensitive nature of what Mladic knows and what he could reveal – that explains the lengths to which Serbia has gone, and the high price it has paid, to avoid handing him over to The Hague.
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