As I type this Ratko Mladic is making his first appearance in front of the Hague War Crimes tribunal. He is the man who commanded forces in the Bosnian war who butchered 8,000 men and children at Srebrenica and hunted down 10,000 men, women and children on the streets of Sarajevo.

Due process requires he is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Whilst I don’t mean to skewer the process, it was proven some time ago.

I went to Sarajevo in 2007 to meet with youth politicians from the region. Young people my age who, when we were 7 and I was waking up in the morning to go to school, were instead dodging sniper fire and mortar shells.

Even now Sarajevo is a city visibly and emotionally scarred by the conflict. The city is infamous for its ‘Roses’ – when mortar shells land they create a crater and a splash of smaller craters, instead of filling in the craters with concrete, the cities administrators instead filled them with red resin – the effect has left hundreds of poignant memorials on the city's streets, each rose marking a violation and a silent act of memorial to the victims.  

Almost two decades later, justice has been slow in coming. Mladic is now 69 and made the argument at his extradition hearing, and again in court today that he was an elderly and frail man too ill to stand trial, a cynical thing for a man who cut down thousands of lives in their prime, to say.

Action was too slow to happen and too inadequate when it did to stop the atrocities. NATO commenced bombing against the army commanded by Mladic in 1995, the alliance bombed again in 1999 finally bringing the wider conflict to an end.  The fact we allowed such horrors to happen on our doorstep for almost a full decade is a shame on European powers, as well as the international community.

We are 10 years on from that conflict, and the international community has learnt lessons. This year we have seen UN action against Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of the Ivory Coast, a dictator responsible for inciting racial tensions and accused of organising death squads who was apprehended by French forces in April before the country spiralled into another full blown civil war. The NATO aerial intervention in Libya, similarly, prevented what would undoubtedly have become a genocide by Gaddafi forces against the those who oppose him in Benghazi, Misrata and elsewhere.

Some are uncomfortable with the concept that we should intervene where we can to stop crimes against humanity, pre-emptively if possible. I am not. Human rights are universal as long as there are people willing to make that case, and as long as there are countries willing to enforce that principal. It was also the attitude which allowed men like Mladic to get away with the murder of Children, treating the targeting of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo as sport.

The human cost, let alone any other cost of that conflict is enormous, and will be lasting. I have no doubt that the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo will find reconciliation, indeed, that process has already begun, but the fact that it happened, and the fact that countries which could have stopped it in Europe, Germany, France, the UK did not, is something that we must never allow to be repeated.  

Tags: Balkans, Hague, Ratko Mladic, Sarajevo, Serbia, War crimes