Amanpour: Karadzic arrest is big step forward for Balkan nations

(CNN) -- The arrest of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic is an important step in the reconciliation process in the Balkans, Christiane Amanpour, CNN senior international correspondent, says.

Karadzic is accused of ordering the deadly siege of Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia and atrocities including the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica.

Amanpour, who has covered the conflict in the former Yugoslavia since its beginnings in the early 1990s, offered her thoughts on what Karadzic's arrest after 13 years on the run means for the Balkans.

What changed to make Karadzic's arrest possible?

There are several factors. There's a new, more moderate, more democratic, pro-Western Serbian government led by Boris Tadic. Interestingly, Tadic came to power by forming a coalition with the Socialist party, which used to be led by Slobodan Milosevic, who also was indicted on war-crimes charges. Watch Amanpour's profile of Karadzic »

There had been a lot of pressure on the Serbian government to capture and hand over Karadzic and the Serbian military leader Ratko Mladic, who remains at large. Until then, Serbia was not going to be allowed to be fully reintegrated into the international community or become a full participating member of the European Union. For that reason, catching Karadzic was at the top of Tadic's list of priorities as the new president of Serbia.

Will anyone else be prosecuted for protecting Karadzic during the 13 years he was hiding out?

We don't know, but it seems unlikely that will happen. What probably happened was he was hidden by friends, family, old Bosnian connections. There was a lot of talk that maybe he had gone up to the border area with Montenegro, where he was born. But he really did keep a very, very low profile, and it's very difficult to know the exact circumstances while he was on the run.

It's said that he made a huge fortune, along with his family and henchmen on the run, in the black-market cigarette trade. We can't really confirm that at this point, but many Bosnian Serbs were doing that during the war.

What is important, though, is that when he was indicted, so was the former Bosnian Serb army general Ratko Mladic. Mladic was responsible militarily in the ethnic-cleansing deaths of some 200,000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats. He was responsible for the deaths of 7,000 to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were killed in the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995. See a timeline of the conflict »

And Mladic is still on the run, but he has kept a much higher profile over the years than Karadzic. He was spotted several times in Belgrade, even at a time when the prosecutors of the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) and Western leaders were demanding that Serbia hand over both of them, and they didn't.

So now Mladic is even more a marked man?

That's right. The focus now will be on Mladic. He's the last major outstanding war-crimes suspect to be wanted by the criminal tribunal in The Hague.

Both Mladic and Karadzic were indicted twice in 1995 on various charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and violation of the laws of war. Both were indicted for the massacre at Srebrenica and for the siege of Sarajevo and the general slaughter of Muslims during the campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995.

Do all the prosecutions have to completed before Serbia can gain full acceptance as a part of the European Union?

It does have to be brought to completion, but Karadzic's arrest is going to go a long way toward making Serbia's position in the international community much better. It will be a giant leap in that regard.

Already there's been reaction from The Hague which was very positive; there's been reaction from the White House which has been very positive. The White House commended what it called "the courageous decision" by Serbia to go out and bring in Radovan Karadzic.

Left unsaid is that they still want to see Ratko Mladic brought in and brought to justice.

This is about justice, it's about accountability, it's about not allowing those at the highest levels of power who have been indicted to continue with impunity. And it is about setting a standard in the world in regard to these terrible crimes against humanity and to deal with such terrible things a genocide which continue today. See a map of the Balkans today »

Just within the past week the International Criminal Court indicted the president of Sudan, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on genocide charges because of the crimes committed in Darfur.

Has the international tribunal learned anything from what happened with Slobodan Milosevic?

One hopes that the International Criminal Tribunal has learned from that fiasco.

What happened was that from the start Milosevic refused to accept the legitimacy of the tribunal, refused to accept the legitimacy of the charges in the indictment against him, and refused to accept having a lawyer represent him. He insisted on representing himself.

And because he was a politician and was playing to the gallery at home and trying to turn the tables away from himself and against the international community, he was able to drag that proceeding out and filibuster for years.

Because he did not have a lawyer representing him the tribunal bent over backwards to ensure that he was perceived to have been getting a fair trial. So they very rarely stepped in and cut him short.

In hindsight, it should have been a much better-managed trial and they should have found some way of having him and his interests represented in some other way than letting him call the shots and drag the process out for years to an ultimately inconclusive end when he died while still in the dock.

That's got to be something the tribunal has learned from. It will have to make sure that any future trials are much more streamlined and focused on the charges at hand while providing a fair trial.

Meanwhile, the tribunal's mandate is winding down, and within a year or so it is going to be closed down. So this trial has to be brought to a conclusion by then, and with any luck they'll get Ratko Mladic brought in and bring him to trial too.

And if they don't meet that deadline then Mladic goes free?

He won't necessarily go free. There are other ways he could be tried. He could be tried in Serbia, he could be tried at the International Criminal Court, which is the newest body formed to deal with war crimes.

But the tribunal was set up because it was deemed that the countries in question were not going to put these suspects on trial at home.

If they do decide to put them on trial at home, that is another way of achieving justice with regard to Mladic. But hopefully he'll be captured. Hopefully he'll be brought in and the trial can take place under the auspices of the United Nations at the Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

You visited Bosnia in April. Have you talked to anyone there since Karadzic's arrest was announced?

I certainly have, and it has been greeted with a great sense of relief and a huge expression of "Finally!" People are just so glad that finally it's happened. These people were wondering whether it would ever happen. Watch Bosnians celebrate Karadzic's arrest »

But beyond that, those who were the victims, the relatives of the victims have been angered by the failure to capture the people responsible for not just the suffering, but the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II -- the notion of concentration camps, which we saw in Bosnia during the '90s, where Bosnian Muslims were herded into those camps; the notion of rape as a tool of war; the notion of ethnic cleansing, basically trying to create an "ethnically pure" zone.

That's what Radovan Karadzic and Mladic did. They broke off and created a rump statelet which they called the Republic of Srpska, which they wanted to be an ethnically pure zone, and they would have liked to join it up with Serbia. The experiment was called "Greater Serbia."

That didn't happen, but they did drive millions of people out of their homes and they killed hundreds of thousands of people.

So these were huge crimes, and particularly in Srebrenica. The massacre in July 1995 left the widows, the mothers, the sisters, the relatives of all those men and boys so angry and bitter that justice had not yet been done. And only very gradually is it being done. So this is going to be a giant step in the right direction.

These two men could have been brought to justice years ago. They were indicted in 1995. The end of 1995 saw the end of the Bosnia war via the U.S.-mediated Dayton accords. Then, at the very beginning of 1996, a huge, 60,000-member NATO-led peacekeeping force arrived.

The thing is, they never seriously went after Karadzic and Mladic. NATO decided that they would let these criminal fade into the background, fearing that arresting them could cause instability or endanger the NATO troops.

I still believe that was an overcautious reading of the situation. And I believe strongly, and facts bear it out, that the continued failure to bring them to justice severely hampered the reconciliation, the stability, the political, social and cultural reconciliation and reunification and stability of Bosnia.

And now that can happen?

I believe it's going to take some time. It's a process. There are still a lot of wounds, but this is a big step in the right direction.

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