In the years following the Cold War and the hemorrhaging of Yugoslavia, Serbia earned the dubious distinction as Europe’s pariah state, widely viewed as a brutal aggressor in the Balkan wars.
At first, the news seemed too good to be true: Serbia’s most wanted man, General Ratko Mladic, the accused architect of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide of more than 8,000 men and boys, was arrested on Thursday morning after more than a decade of what had seemed to have been futile search.