Serbian denialism?

Serbian denialism?

Serbia aspires to join the EU, but has it really faced up to its war-guilt?

This article reports on a recent survey which shows that most Serbians do not think Ratko Mladic is guilty of war crimes, or that he should even be handed over to the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

Anyone who knows Serbia well will not be surprised by these findings, nor by the fact that the majority of Serbs have a negative opinion of the Hague.  Many Serbs have told me they believe the UN tribunal is biased against them.

The Serb leaders in the Bosnian civil war, Ratko Mladic, and Radovan Karadzic, are widely lionised, especially, in the Serbian part of Bosnia, known as Republika Srpska.

The Serbs are not alone in their distrust of the Hague tribunal. Across the former Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanians, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks have all tended to complain that the tribunal is biased when it convicts one of their own. It's a depressing picture.

The Balkans are calm for now, and may remain so for many years. But if the UN judicial process was intended to help bring about reconciliation through a shared understanding of the past, it seems to have failed.