Ted Galen Carpenter: Mladic’s Arrest and Corrosive Bosnian Myths

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of eight books on international affairs. Malou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at Cato.

The arrest of accused war criminal Ratko Mladic, the commander of Serb forces during Bosnia’s civil war in the 1990s, creates an opportunity to correct the historical record and provide a more balanced treatment of that episode.

One hopes that the media coverage of Mladic’s arrest and forthcoming trial will not be a repetition of the simplistic mythology about the Bosnian conflict that was so pervasive when it occurred. U.S. and European officials, the Western news media, ethnic lobbies, and much of the foreign policy community spun a Manichean melodrama. In that melodrama, the Serbs were almost entirely responsible for the breakup of Yugoslavia and for the violence that followed, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs became arch villains, while Croats and Bosnian Muslims became innocent victims.

Inflated casualty statistics were the staple of government statements and media accounts to provide evidence for the villainous Serbs thesis. To this day, many accounts of the Bosnian conflict cite the figure of 250,000 (or sometimes even 300,000) fatalities —with the implication that the vast majority of victims were Muslim civilians. Yet analyses by groups as diverse as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the BBC, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have all concluded that the number of fatalities was much lower...