Arrest Would Boost Serbia's Standing

The arrest of Ratko Mladic, if confirmed, would represent a big boost for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the UN court charged with prosecuting those accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars that shook south-east Europe in the 1990s.

But the wider significance of any arrest might lie in the fact that Serbia, frequently accused by western countries of failing to cooperate in the hunt for indicted war criminals, would appear finally to have taken concrete action against one of the Balkans’ two most wanted men - a fugitive it was long accused of harboring. That would raise its standing with the US and key European states at a crucial juncture.

The capture of the man most closely associated with the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims would raise hopes that another key figure could soon be behind bars: Radovan Karadzic - the Bosnian Serb political leader and Mladic’s alleged partner in crime.

An arrest would also be likely to help advance Serbia’s hopes of membership of the European Union and its acceptance as a modern nation state which has broken with its bloody past.

Despite continuing concerns about its level of cooperation with The Hague, the European Commission gave Serbia the green light last April to open talks on a "stabilization and association" agreement, a move that opened the way for eventual full EU membership. Those talks are now under way, since when pressure on the Serbian authorities to track down the remaining fugitives has grown.

That pressure increased significantly in December when General Ante Gotovina, a Croatian war crimes suspect, was detained in the Canary Islands and flown to The Hague, two months after Croatia was unexpectedly allowed to proceed with full EU membership talks. The two events appear to have been connected.

Pressure within Serbia to draw a line under the Balkan wars has also been growing as its people have watched the growing economic prosperity of other parts of the old Yugoslavia, such as Slovenia, an EU member since 2004. Serb anxieties about the future are also focused on the future of the country’s union with Montenegro, which will hold a referendum in April on whether to pursue independence.

The arrest of Mladic would be unlikely to soften western attitudes over Kosovo, Serbia’s breakaway southern province that has been under UN administration since the 1999 Nato intervention. After years of inaction, the US, backed by the EU, launched final status talks this week. The unstated objective and most likely outcome is understood to be "conditional independence" for Kosovo.

Serbia vehemently opposes any such deal, but this is unlikely to outweigh Washington’s larger geo-political calculations.