I read Eastern Approaches this morning to come across this
article. When I read the rest of my European RSS feeds, about half of the press releases were about the arrest of
Ratko Mladić, the haunting general of Bosnian Serb forces. He ordered the killing of 8,000 Bosniaks in Srebrenica and was the commanding officer in the Siege of Sarajevo––in other words, he is the big fish. As the article points out, this opens up the discussion for Serbia's EU ascension, but it also allows for the nation to lustrate its past. The lessons of
The Haunted Land seem just as poignant now as they were in the early 90s. The big question now is the same one that Rosenberg writes about, "How do we purge the past to move forward?"
With the possibility of EU ascension on the line, Serbia will be more closely watched as they lustrate one of their biggest and meanest ghosts of a bloody, post-Communist war. I hope that Serbia is able to do so and move forward to a much brighter future.
