There’s a game we used to play during the World Cup in the days before saturation football coverage made every player drearily familiar. We would look at the foreign players and try to decide where in the city they would most likely be from if they had been born in Waterford. Some players might have the look of a neighbor in Central Avenue, some might have a Ballybeg head, some Larchville or Arbour Road (it tended to be very Saint Paul’s centric). I particularly liked the hypothesis my brothers came up with in relation to Hristo Stoichkov and Gheorghe Hagi, that they looked like two partially employed flat mates staying in a run-down Shortcourse house full of empty cans and the odd lack who would go to their mother’s house every Sunday to get fed and have their overworked underpants washed. Gheorghe Hagi was one of the greatest players of his generation, but when I think of him, I think of that. When Ratko Mladic appeared at the War Crimes Tribunal last week in a borrowed suit and hair too small for his head, I thought he looked like an old guy on his way out of a bookies on Mayor’s Walk, with a rolled up copy of The Star under his arm. Such is the banality of evil. He didn’t look like that in 1995. Then he was leaner and, underneath his Serbian Šajkača cap, was the world’s most famous mass murderer. The footage of him speaking to the refugees in Srebrenica is almost obscene – what is it he’s thinking? He’s bending down listening to these people, furrowing his brow in concentration, his eyes meeting theirs with apparent honesty and all he can be thinking, surely, is: “we are going to kill you, all of you, and the cameras bearing witness to this conversation will not save you”. It’s still chilling sixteen years later. Mladic was a dark spectre for all of Europe in the 1990’s but by pure random chance the benign, decent liberal democracy that fate singled out to be particularly humiliated by him was the one I happened to be living in at the time, the Netherlands. The day I arrived in Amsterdam, Ireland was on the front page of every newspaper in Europe: the IRA had just declared a ceasefire. The centuries old Irish conflict was about to be resolved and every newspaper editor in Europe thought that was front page news. As an Irishman, the interest was gratifying, although that soon wore off with months of people asking me what was happening in the peace process – I was ecstatically happy to be living in Amsterdam and didn’t care about the peace process, but when I said that to my European friends they always seemed disapproving. The English were much more understanding. There was optimism that the problem could be fixed however, it was an optimistic time. Just five years before people power had overthrown communist dictatorship and there was already plenty of East Europeans living in Amsterdam, most of them taking to life in Western democracy as if they had been born to it. The transition seemed to suggest no more dislocation from forty years of communism than someone missing the starter at a dinner party. The problems of the world were falling like nine pins. Nelson Mandela, for years just a photograph over the left hand shoulder of a newsreader, emerged from prison a far more impressive leader than anyone had a right to hope for, and led South Africa out of Apartheid. It was an optimistic time. With the end of the Cold War, the CIA decided to lift its boot off the neck of South American democracy – somewhat – and people were free to vote for politicians who didn’t necessarily have the approval of the United Fruit Company or the Pope. It was an optimistic time. Iraq invaded Kuwait and the world acted in what seemed to be – if you ignored the oil-shaped elephant in the room – the first example of the kind of collective security that the UN was designed to deliver. It was an optimistic time. Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shook hands! Optimism? Anything was possible! Historian Francis Fukuyama declared that history was over, that it was clear everyone in the world wanted to live in free market liberal democracies and, at varying paces, it was to this goal every nation on the planet was embarked. Of course there would be difficulties along the way. The break-up of Yugoslavia appeared unnecessarily messy, but it was sure to sort itself out, and Europe would be there to show the bright path forward for the emerging democracies to join our civilized club. But Yugoslavia didn't sort itself out, the siege of Sarajevo dragged on and on, the killing became relentless. It was then we were introduced to the double act of Mladic and Karadžić. Mladic was a very different kind of general to Rommel and Patton. His goal was to skirt around the people who actually had weapons (sometimes known as "soldiers"), find the civilians and kill as many as he could until someone stopped him. The horrible realization – thrilling though to Mladic – was that Europe couldn’t stop him; it didn’t have the will or the means. Fukuyama was wrong; history, in all its cruelty, was back. By 1995 I was living in the Netherlands when, in one of the final acts of the war, Mladic decided to swoop on one last group of Bosniak civilians before a peace deal was struck. It was the Dutch army who had conveniently gathered the victims in Srebrenica; it was the Dutch who had to see their conscript soldiers brushed aside by this self-confident Evil so it could carry out genocide. It could have been any of us, Irish, Finnish, Spanish, it just happened to be the Dutch. The revelations surrounding the muddle which put this Dutch battalion in such an awful situation led to the collapse of Wim Kok’s government in 2002 and I’m not sure Dutch politics and the Netherlands have been the same since. Could Holland’s recent falling out of love with its liberal traditions be traced back to the day these traditions were trampled on by Mladic? In the years after Srebrenica, it was clearly a matter of national shame in the Netherlands, this wonderful country whose soldiers should never have had to face this Evil alone. What I found sometimes, if in the company of Dutch and Serbs, and some alcohol had flowed, the Dutch could round on the Serbs: “What’s wrong with you?” “Why are you people so murderous?” “Why did you do this?” Sometimes I would chip in an explain the atrocities meted out to Serbs during the war (Mladic’s father died trying to bump off a fascist Croatian leader in 1945) but that doesn’t really explain it; after all, these people had lived happily together for generations after the war and still love to dish out twelve’s to each other come the Eurovision. It was comforting to think that there was just something monstrous about the Serbs that put them beyond the liberal democratic Pale, in the same way some people liked to view Arabs or Muslims after 9/11. It’s nonsense. In Amsterdam I worked with people from Peshawar which is Taliban Central and they were normal, hard-working, decent and fond of fart jokes, just like me. Indeed it was 9/11 that for many people marks the end of post-Berlin Wall optimism but for me that happened with Mladic. I’m back on Mayors Walk thinking about Mladic coming out of that bookies and it’s not a fantasy to imagine that a fella like him could be from Waterford. He could, he could be from anywhere, that’s what made him so frightening.
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