They found him, they say, living under a false name, in a dilapidated house belonging to a relative. Later we will no doubt find that the “dilapidation” of General Ratko Mladic’s hidey-hole meant that the frames needed painting and the set-top box was on the blink; like bin Laden’s “million-dollar” compound which turned out to look like a Merimbula holiday rental with old Robert Ludlum novels and a broken ping-pong table, the final location of war criminals and terrorists usually turn out to conform to the needs of the story being told.

With the arrest of General Ratko Mladic, the last major target of investigations into the Balkans Wars of the 1990s, we must now endure the same pantomime process as occurred with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the revelation that he was more or less staying in a bungalow of the ISI Officers’ Club. It is obvious that dozens of people have known where Mladic was since the war ended, and that hundreds of people have known that those dozens of people have known — and that this knowledge has been stretched across the EU, its colony of Kosovo, and the disunited states of the former Yugoslavia.

So the whole idea that Mladic was “caught”, or been captured, is merely part of the fiction. He was merely, finally, given up, on the day the EU’s foreign affairs commissioner came to Belgrade ahead of a report emphasising that EU membership for Serbia could not be considered until he was given up. Mladic is frail following a stroke; most likely he consented to being given up for arrest, knowing that he is unlikely to live to see the end of his trial, and will spend much of the time in hospital. Quite possibly it was only with his consent that he was given up at all.

With Mladic’s arrest much of the morality play that attended the Balkans wars will kick into action once more — even though the horrors of it have been superseded in memory by 9/11 and Iraq. It is as odd to the memory now that Europe was consumed by these vicious conflicts — that a Eurail pass could take you into hell, a few hours from Vienna — as it was when the wars began at the very moment that George H.W. Bush was announcing the “new world order” and Francis Fukuyama declaring the end of history.

At a time when radical Islamists lived in the western memory as the “brave mujahideen” of Afghanistan, the Serbs became the appointed enemy of the West and of humanity. As the Bosnian War became entrenched, and as atrocities by Bosnian and Croat forces were minimised, every ancient Western European prejudice regarding Slavic peoples was revived, amplified and often infantilised.

The Serbs were presented through the medium of old Nazi propaganda; at other times this acquired an infantile spin, as the revived interest in the Lord of the Rings provided a new image — the Serbs were pig people, orcs, humans but not human. This culminated during the Kosovo war when the pseudo-Churchillian historian Andrew Roberts wrote in the London Evening Standard that Belgrade should be attacked with nuclear weapons, laying bare the eternal purpose of dehumanisation, as a way of making it psychologically and politically possible to engage in mass annihilation. In the wake of the fall of the Eastern bloc, the Serbs, as a people, provided a stop-gap enemy for the West to define itself against, until 9/11 in turn consigned them to history.

That is not to say that the Serb leadership did not supply more than sufficient raw material to make such a case. Cumulatively, it is quite possible that Croat atrocities, on a smaller scale, approach that of the Serbian forces, and there is no doubt that Croatia (aided by Germany) had far more culpability for starting the process that led to war in the first place.

But there is nothing that compares to the cool and systemic mass murder of Srebrenica, or to the particular and noxious Serbian nationalist ideology that arose among the leadership as Yugoslavia decomposed politically in the 1980s, a moonshine of lunatic overvaluation — the Serbs were the true Europeans, guarding the continent from the Turkish horde — and minging self-pity, the country as permanent victim of greater powers.

Many ordinary Serbs could take this attitude too, but they aren’t alone in that in Europe, as examples from Galway to Ireland make clear. What made for a supercharged lethality within the Serbian leadership was the manner in which such a self-conception became frigged up among the Serbian elite. Yugoslav federalism held much of this at bay, but it also incubated it, buying peace after an ultra-violent war only at the price of holding a whole series of unanswered question is suspension.

There were other, more practical things in the mix, too: the coming carve up of the Yugoslav public sector as Communism as even the most vestigial formation collapsed, and the flood of cheap drugs as the Balkans became a gateway for trafficking to Europe. They all created a type of war which we now recognise easily, but which was new at the time — one in which the performance of identity through violence was as much a part of the conflict as the actual achievement of territorial aims.

Thus Mladic was a general but he was also a gang leader, on a par with Zeljko Raznatovic, aka “Arkan”, the death squad thug who ran women, smack, cigarettes and guns, married a beauty queen and gave her a pop career, and would loll around in the foyers of foreign correspondents hotels giving impromptu interviews.

Like the plague, the Balkans War was theatre and real, open for inspection, a laboratory of war, an atrocity museum, in which rape, degradation and sheer invention — making fathers rape and then kill daughters was a speciality — performed the hysterical dimension of victim nationalism, amid the books, graphic novels and Sarajevo safaris that brought the war to the world.

Mladic deserves a reckoning, but the whole process of EU justice will simply extend the theatre –since any fair assessment should have put Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and his epigones in the dock too. Not being the official enemy, they never were nor will be (aside from a few low level soldiers). The Serb as “other” will return for an encore presentation, and the question closer to home will never be asked: those who made this war lived for decades spruiking a victim nationalism to all who would listen — through political office, newspaper columns, TV shows.

They quite possibly had no idea what they would subsequently become capable of. It is worth looking around at those closer to home who run a trade in the same manufacture of internal and external enemies, of grievance, resentment and fear, and ask the same question.