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With the arrest of the fugitive Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's greatest war criminals is at last behind bars.
The career of the former psychiatrist is a classic example of the "banality of evil". Fifteen years ago, thousands of innocent people were murdered as his troops rampaged across the Balkans. The tragedy was all the deeper because despite the claims of weak-willed Western leaders in the Nineties that "ancient hatreds" were behind the war, Bosnia is one of Europe's great melting pots.
Bosnia traces its history from the Middle Ages, when a Slav state emerged in the Balkans between Hungary and the Byzantine Empire.
Under Bosnia's first king, Tvrtko I, its reach extended to the Adriatic. But just a century later, in 1463, the kingdom was absorbed into the vast empire of the Ottoman Turks, the greatest power in the Mediterranean.
It was the Ottomans who brought Islam to Bosnia. And as thousands of Bosnians converted, many hoping to escape religious taxes and move up the social hierarchy, the country evolved into the extraordinary ethnic mosaic that endures today, with a mixed population of Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, as well as small numbers of Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution in Spain.
"Muslim, Christian and Jews went peacefully on their way," wrote a Swiss doctor, remembering lazy summer afternoons in Sarajevo in the 1860s, "enjoying in equal measure that peaceful, blessed time, and there was no thought of religious hatred." Under Ottoman rule, Bosnia was one of the empire's most influential provinces. Bosnian generals, admirals and viziers played key roles in Ottoman history. And the Turks left a superb cultural legacy: not just kebabs and coffeehouses, but bazaars, mosques and bridges.
When Ottoman rule ended in 1878, Bosnia was occupied by the Austrians, who treated the little country as a model colony. But the cancer of nationalism was already spreading, and by the early 1900s the Young Bosnia movement was pressing for independence. In August 1914 the Black Hand terrorist group, using arms provided by Serbian intelligence, assassinated the Austrian heir in Sarajevo — the spark that ignited the First World War.
The last century was hard on Bosnia. During the Second World War, it fell under the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, with Jews and Serbs exterminated in their thousands.
And when Yugoslavia collapsed in the Nineties, Radovan Karadzic fanned the flames of Serbian paranoia, unleashing an orgy of bloodshed.
With Karadzic's arrest, Bosnia can at last move on. Already it attracts thousands of tourists. Soon, no doubt, the biggest threats to the people of Sarajevo will be rowdy British stag parties — a welcome change from the malignant ambitions of the former psychiatrist.
