Celebrating the capture of a genocidal rapist

     At the Tribeca Film Festival of 2008, I watched a documentary entitled The Trial of Milosovic, a skillfully edited composite of archival footage on the Hague's failure to convict the titular monster.
      Milosovic's sudden death in 2006 cut the trials short, but not before the occurrence of a particularly infuriating incident in which he smirked from the criminal box - a smirk rendered immortal by the rolling camera - that the successful evasion of the law by Ratko Mladic, his lead general, proved the ultimate impotence of his enemies in bringing his legacy to rest.
      Flashback to another memory of mine: a rendition of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues in 2005, where a performer rendered with devastating efficacy the testimony of a Bosnian woman assaulted in one of Serbia's rape camps, the latter a brainchild both of Milosovic and his murderous general.
      Yesterday's arrest of Mladic can of course do little to undo the trauma that such women experienced, and can do even less - thanks to the intervention of oblivion - at wiping that godawful smile from Milosovic's face, but in the month that saw the extinction of Osama Bin Laden, his capture again signals the world's commitment to squashing the careers of mass-murderers, and this time a squashing done properly: through arrest and trial, and not - as with Bin Laden - through homicide.
      Mladic managed to wreak havoc on both religious and racial grounds, overseeing the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995. He also co-opted the timeless weapon of rape as a demoralizing and eugenic tactic, systematically assaulting countless Bosnian women, with the aim of breaking the spirit of his enemies, and even, as a long term plan, breeding out the Bosniak bloodline through forced impregnation.
      I find myself wishing that the U.N could somehow allow for the victims of Mladic to line up in their hundreds of thousands and one at a time spit in his face, and I'd hope that he'd be handcuffed, so the saliva could sit, undisturbed, on his face.    
      Unfortunately, there just aren't enough handcuffs in the world, though there's plenty of untapped saliva.