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The term “genocide” did not exist until it was formulated after the Second World War. The word and what it defined had to be invented in response to the systematic mass-killing of humans by other humans.

The term “ethnic cleansing” did not exist until Radovan Karadzic determined to kill thousands of civilians of the former Yugoslavia: it is a mis-translation of former Bosnian president’s own intvented phrase which, when correctly translated into English, means “ethnic cleaning”. A far more clinical term from the former psychiatrist.

Rape was not a war-crime until it was first posited in 1996, as a direct result of the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia:

European [Union] investigators calculated that in 1992, 20,000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Serbs [in Bosnia].

It was not until 2001 that the first convictions were secured in relation to the crime of rape as a crime against humanity. The convictions and sentences were handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Together with Ratko Mladic, who remains at large, Radovan Karadzic has been indicted by the ICTY for:

genocide, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, wilful killing, persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians, taking of hostages

Under Karadzic and Mladic, men and boys in Bosnia were taken to clearings wooded areas, subjected to insults and mock executions, before being shot dead. They were shot dead in sequence, so that those who were waiting to be shot dead could help drag away the bodies of those who had already been shot dead. They were killed in their thousands.

Under Karadzic and Mladic, women and girls were detained and subjected to repeated mass rapes by Bosnian soldiers over weeks and months. Those who sought to complain to the police authorities were raped by those same police officers. They were repeatedly raped in their thousands.

People were starved to death in besieged cities. Residents were arbitrarily shot at and killed by snipers.

These atrocities did not take place in some “distant past”, such as the 1930s and ’40s. They are not recent events in a far-away part of the world, where it’s hot, where the language is unintelligible to us, and the customs alien. Not that any of these things should - or do - make the slightest bit of difference in fact.

These things were perpetrated by white, Christian Europeans, from a modern, “civilised” part of the world, just over ten years ago, in a place that is a few hours’ flight from this country.

The barbarism inflicted by the forces of Karadzic and Mladic are as real and brutal as any horror stories that we may have heard from Rwanda, Darfur, Southern Sudan, Zimbabwe, Chechnya.. The killings of an estimated 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica are acknowldeged as being the biggest European massacre since World War II.

And yet, incredibly, some people don’t actually care. They don’t think it happens; it is in the past; it is too far removed; genocide happens at different times or in different parts of the world. Others may regard genocidal murderers as heroes. Until recently, Karadzic had been protected by the Serbian authorities, who were supposed to be seeking his arrest. His arrest now comes ahead of an EU meeting to discuss Serbia’s accession to the Union.

If you have a thinking brain; if you are a human being; if you have understanding of anything at all: then it is not possible in good conscience to ignore the significance of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, and the continued pursuit of Ratko Mladic.

Recognisable patterns of events lead to genocide. When we have learned judges ruling that entire social groups cannot suffer discrimination because everybody knows that group are all thieves anyway; when we have governments refusing to classify distinct social groups as and ethnic minority in order to avoid giving them protections against all forms of discrimination; when people are hated simply because they are different: the rest of society has an obligation to remain vigilant.

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See also: Karadzic Arrested