Justice at last for the mothers of Srebrenica

Liljan Zelen-Karadzic woke up with a bad feeling yesterday.  "As the phone rang, I knew something was wrong," she said.
 
The wife of the former psychiatrist, poet (dreadful), and wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, was right to have a bad feeling. Her husband, responsible for the genocide of the Bosnian people, including 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica 13 years ago this month, was finally caught by Serb security forces after an alleged foreign tip-off.

It had taken more than a decade to find the 'Osama bin Laden of Europe', who had eluded even the intrepid former chief investigator at The Hague, Carla del Ponte. How she searched for him – following leads he was dressed as a woman in a mountain village in Montenegro, or protected by monks in monasteries. How aghast she was when Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb president, died in his cell before justice could get her clutches in him.
 
A Hollywood movie starring Richard Gere (straight to video!) was even made about the hunt for Karadzic.
 
When I think of Karadzic, I have a strong memory of the scent of pine: of several trips over the many years of war to Pale, the tinpot so-called Republika Sprksa where he reigned. How many times I caught sight of his ridiculous bouffant, heard his roaring laughter, and his idiotic statements about destroying Sarajevo, the city where he had once lived and taught.
 
Now, let us go back in time: April, 1992, the barricades go up in Sarajevo, the phone lines get cut, the water and electricity goes off and one bakery operates. Food disappears, as does money from the banks.  
 
Karadzic and his Sarajevo University cronies retire to the hills and recruit a group of toothless peasants to their Bosnian Serb Army to "bomb Sarajevo into madness".  They nearly do it – except the Sarajevo people madden them by keeping (bizarrely enough) a black humour, organising militias and black markets, and managing to stay alive during the three-and-a-half years of medieval siege.
 
The people even built a tunnel under the city to transport arms (to top off their misery, an arms embargo was imposed on them) but also so that women and children and wounded soldiers could escape. All of us in the Sarajevo press corps had an unspoken rule – we never wrote of the tunnel lest it get discovered and bombed. One Guardian reporter did, however, for a scoop, and to my knowledge never returned to the city.
 
Because the Bosnian war mattered to me, and I never wanted to forget those estimated 250,000 people who did not have to die, I often returned, particularly on the anniversary of the over-running of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces on July 11 (for the record, 13 years ago today, British forces arrived in Sarajevo).

I would sit with mothers or wives of the victims and listen to their stories, which they always ended by saying: "There will be no justice done until Karadzic has been caught, along with Mladic."

This morning, flicking through the channels, I saw one of those mothers speaking to Bosnian TV. She looked older, worn out from years of pain. But there was a look of triumph on her face. Half of the evil duo has been caught. Now they just have to go after Ratko Mladic. Once he is caught, then the healing can truly begin. ·