How bloodlust helps history repeat itself

No doubt many will think that the arrest of the butcher Karadzic brings an end, if only symbolically, to the abominable war in Bosnia. We shall see. However, that the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs was practising as a specialist in alternative medicine doesn't surprise me a bit. Those who think that medical cures can result from molecules remembering which molecules they have once been alongside - as some homeopaths believe - might with equal ease believe that Muslim men and boys are legitimate subjects for genocide.

And to be sure, in one sense, the Bosnian war is over: which is, of course, what was said about the Bosnian war of 1914-15, and the Bosnian war of 1940-44, and other Bosnian imbroglios in earlier decades, of which I know nothing.

Equally, the Northern Irish war of 1969-96 is over, as are the many wars fought along the Lagan and through the Sperrins back to the 17th-century Ulster plantation.

Maybe these ancestral disputes will genuinely and finally die, and the inhabitants of those bitter places will wake up with little or no memory of the abominable things that were once done in their name, and can then proceed to order their lives in accordance with the new and enlightened dispensation.

For, sometimes people do change: the former Confederacy of the US probably has far better race relations than do its former enemies in the War Between the States. The black upper class of Atlanta and Birmingham have nothing to learn from anyone about self-confidence, or education. Meanwhile, Jews leave Israel for Germany and Austria, and in Russia, more bizarrely than I can understand, accept or believe, Hitler and Stalin are joint icons of the skinhead mobs.

We cannot know what or how we will think: we do not know what we might remember, or what we will forget. And Bosnia is the proof of that: for I spent some of the summer of 1992 there, and much of the following summer also. The question I asked the Bosnian people then is the question I ask now: Where did this poison, after nearly 40 years of communist indoctrination against religious tribalism, come from?

The answer then was, as no doubt the answer now would be: We do not know - but with this caveat: it was - always - the other crowd who started it.

No one has the absolute ability to control the hive-mind of the tribe: somehow or other, the Russian Orthodox Church survived seven decades of Lenin-Stalinist oppression followed by an even more insidious state-corruption, to emerge as one of the most powerful religions in Europe: indeed, in straightforward political clout, it might well be the strongest of them all. No other patriarch or pope has the ear of those who dispatch nuclear missiles into the ice-cold waters of the Arctic, or sends the materials of atomic fusion to maniacs in Teheran.

Just as historical events defy prediction, so does human conduct confound computation. In 1989, the scenario did not exist in which Egyptian and US armies would fight alongside one another against Iraq, while the latter dropped ballistic missiles on Israel and Saudi Arabia. By the spring of 1991, all these things had come to pass.

From the Brazilian Expeditionary Force fighting the Germans in the Italian Apennines in the bitter winter of 1944-45, to the war between the French and Australians in Syria in 1941, history makes monkeys of us all.

Chapters do not close. The passions of heart and hope and hate might gradually expire within the pages of a closed book, but they do not simply vanish. The marginalised and excluded Protestants of the Irish Free State of 1921, are now effectively an indistinguishable part of the young Irish nation.

But that process was neither pain-free nor swift: yet the wound healed in silence is the wound that heals longest. Who knows what fond thrill still passes through the mind of Bosnian Serbs whenever the name Karadzic is whispered? He did not personally slay but caused others to slay: and in the minds of some of his tribe, it was blood well shed.

History proceeds beyond our control: the stream that has vanished like one of Dublin's underground rivers, can suddenly erupt and drown a bus queue. And the only time that we might hope that history can cease to surprise us is when we are beyond all surprise, and have joined that great throng beyond, about whom history is written.

But then we shall probably find that its members are as mystified by history as we have been, and are begging for enlightenment from those alive more recently than they.

What news? - they cry. What news? Well, we can tell them that a happy homeopath in Belgrade was once a satanic sociopath in Bosnia. But this is not news, they retort, merely human nature: did not mankind make heroes of butchers like Napoleon, Lenin and Mao? By their standards, Karadzic is an infant in a playpen.

Listen, the spectres whisper. Our species reveres the sticky spoor of blood: throughout history, we have always raised our quivering, questing nostrils to scent it, upon the winds of war