Justice is often a long time in coming and, even then, can be incomplete. The arrest of Serbian Ratko Mladic, the alleged mastermind of atrocities against non-Serbs and Muslims during the Bosnian war in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, may well turn out to be a prime example of this. Mladic has been on the run from an international indictment handed down 16 years ago for genocide and war crimes committed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including ethnic-cleansing purges of non-Serbs, the shelling and sniping campaign that terrorized Sarajevo for four years, and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. Now, at the age of 69, Mladic shows physical signs of the two strokes he has suffered in the interim, even if he appears to have lost none of the bluster that characterized his reign as Serbia's military chief in Bosnia. He refused to enter a plea to the charges against him at the International Court at The Hague, declaring, at one point, “I am General Mladic and the whole world knows who I am.” Mladic's trial is likely to last for years, and given the state of his health, he may well die before the trial ends, as did former Serbian prime minister Slobodan Mlosevic during the course of his war crimes trial. If the whole world comes to know exactly who Ratko Mladic is during the trial, then a modicum of justice will have been delivered. But is there such a thing as “justice” when the alleged crimes are so enormous? Certainly, the families who buried their sons, husbands and fathers, killed under the orders of Mladic, will feel some satisfaction at the war criminal's imprisonment and public exposure, but nothing will really serve to put them at peace with the atrocities that stole their loved ones from them. The only real justice that can be achieved vis-a-vis Mladic's crimes is full exposure so that any signs of a possible repeat can be quickly identified and a quick end put to any similar crimes. It's a tall order, but one on which the future of humanity truly depends. __
