When Radovan Karadzic was finally arrested in mid-2008 I echoed here a telegram I sent to London from Belgrade in 2001 following the sudden transfer to ICTY of Slobodan Milosevic provocatively titled: "Is Milosevic Innocent?"

My piece "Is Karadzic Innocent?" made the point that it would be easier for ICTY to make a convincing if not irrefutable case against Karadzic than to prove beyond reasonable doubt that Milosevic himself had been guilty of specific war crimes and crimes against humanity in different parts of Bosnia. Karadzic had been at the centre of the Republika Srpska political leadership from the start of the BH conflict and therefore had been that much more closely linked to general and specific atrocities.

What about Ratko Mladic?

Various broad arguments will be mustered in Mladic’s defence, if he lives long enough to be put on trial. That he was a loyal Yugoslav Army officer fighting to stop different regional extremists splitting up his country. That he disagreed with Karadzic on many issues and did well to pull together the disparate Bosnian Serb forces into something like a disciplined modern fighting force. That across Bosnia the Serbs were under attack from Croats and Muslims/Bosniacs alike (re-runs of countless WW2 Nazi-induced local atrocities against Serbs) and were compelled to attack to defend themselves.

On Srebrenica, his team above all will point to the fact that against all the rules of war the Muslims/Bosniacs took cynical advantage of the UN protected status of the enclave to sneak out and kill many local Serbs, retreating to the enclave to skulk behind the UN flag, all with the UN forces failing to act.

But these points and more (whatever you think of them) pale into insignificance when compared with the startling fact that in 1995 the Bosnian Serb forces over-ran the enclave to the UN’s utter humiliation and captured in different places large numbers of Muslims/Bosniacs. In a range of atrocities men (and some boys) were separated from the women and children and massacred.

The numbers of men killed and buried in mass graves are hotly disputed. Some apologists for the Serb cause argue that ‘only’ a couple of thousand people were killed and not the 8000 or so cited by the Muslim/Bosniac side, and that in any case a goodly proportion of the people found in mass graves had died in open conflict.

But the Bosnian Serb leadership has accepted that several thousand people were wrongly killed. When I was British Ambassador in Belgrade even President Kostunica’s office – who otherwise did nothing to hide their sympathies with the Republika Srpska cause and indeed Radovan Karadzic’s plight – gloomily accepted that Mladic had made "a very serious mistake" at Srebrenica. Well, yes, that was one way of putting it.

So if Mladic is fit to stand trial at ICTY he will face overwhelming evidence that Bosnian Serb (and maybe units from Serbia as well) under his direct command committed a whole range of war crimes on a scale and intensity far beyond anything else seen in the Bosnia conflict. We’ll never know what made someone from a disciplined military background plunge into these black depths, although the suicide of his daughter in 1994 must have played a part.

After all the years of radical Serb bravado about Mladic and the sure thing that he would never be taken alive, there he was today shuffling off to prison, a decrepit old man who (say Belgrade media) had had two pistols with him but surrendered meekly when he was finally tracked down.

I never met Mladic, who had been indicted by ICTY by the time I got to Sarajevo in 1996, but NATO forces did have direct contact with him in the early months after Dayton (1995) to make sure that the huge NATO presence moving in to Bosnia did so peacefully. One senior British officer told me how earlier in the conflict as a soldier under UN command he had had various direct dealings with Mladic in the Srebrenica area and watched Mladic painstakingly squeezing out his ugly boils during their meetings.

Balkan Insight are doing a great job for all your Mladic needs. See eg this one, with lots of interesting detail including on the way Karadzic and Mladic often disagreed.

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Serbia’s President Tadic seems to be sticking to his decision not to travel to Warsaw tomorrow for a major meeting of central and eastern European leaders with President Obama, saying that he can not accept the presence there of the President of Kosovo.

Mistake? Yes.

By arresting Mladic Serbia has just made a huge step towards drawing a political line under the policy and attitudes of the Milosevic era. Tadic could expect a rousing reception, although of course that very fact will be encouraging him to stay at home to try to show Serb public opinion that he remains his own boss.

Better in my view to take the chance – and privately and publicly to urge European leaders and Obama to think hard about the fact that as things stand the majority of countries in the world representing the majority of people in the world are still more or less comfortable with Belgrade’s side of the Kosovo argument.