http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2011/0531/Ratko-Mladic-s-arrival-at-Hague-bolsters-promise-of-international-courtsBosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic was placed on a Hague-bound airplane Tuesday after losing his appeal not to be sent there on 11 counts of war crimes in Bosnia. His arrival the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up in 1993, further legitimizes global efforts to establish laws and courts to prosecute crimes that for most of human history took place with impunity and were usually resolved by wars, treaties, time, and forgetting.
Attempts at such forms of international justice have been fraught, imperfect, often highly political, expensive, and selective, many jurists will agree. But in the past two decades, the world has increasingly viewed referrals to The Hague of those accused of large-scale atrocities as the norm – a sea change in the way the world does business. Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi is under investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir has been indicted for war crimes in Darfur.
At The Hague, Mladic, who was in hiding for 16 years, will join his war-partner Radovan Karadzic at the same suburban jail where former Serb President Slobodan Milosevic died in 2005. Mr. Milosevic was the acknowledged mastermind of the Balkan wars in the 1990s.
“Justice is sometimes slower than you would like … there are a lot of holes and weaknesses in the system,” says Mr. Ellis. “But we are moving from impunity to accountability. Those that commit heinous crimes can no longer easily think they will get away with it. For those of us who watch this, it is really a remarkable development.”![](http://www.csmonitor.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/images/0531-owheels-mladic-arrest-hague/10269039-1-eng-US/0531-OWHEELS-Mladic-arrest-hague_full_380.jpg)
Former Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic travels
in a white armored vehicle as he is transported in a police
convoy from a Belgrade courthouse and jail complex to
the airport May 31.