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BELGRADE - As the streets of Belgrade make their lazy, appealing descent from the art-nouveau pomp of the official city to the intimate laneways near the Danube and Sava rivers, they are punctuated several times by the off-kilter silhouettes of large, darkened modern buildings that seem to have imploded on themselves.

These were Serbia's key government ministries, untouched since the spring of 1999. You can still trace the paths of the laser-guided bombs through their roofs and reinforced-concrete floors. Their hollowed-out interiors are frozen in mid-destruction, a deliberate display of regret, caution and anger.

They say: The West did this to us, and they must never be allowed to forget. Or they say: We brought this upon ourselves, and we must never be allowed to forget. It depends whom you ask, and when.

It has been more than nine years since Canadian CF-18 Hornets took off from Aviano in Italy in the campaign that dropped hundreds of bombs on the Serbian capital, the climax of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization action and Canada's first act of military aggression since the Korean War.

It was a strange and controversial move, conducted many years too late and soon forgotten in North America. Its results are debatable, but it did have the salutary effect of stopping the destructive policies of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, and making it possible for democratic-minded Serbs to drive him out of office the next year.

What happened next was another matter.

This week, those democratic-minded Serbs began paying off the last and most onerous of the war reparations thrust upon them. We don't officially call them that – war reparations are supposed to be a vestige of the past, something that went out of fashion after the First World War. Nowadays, we are supposed to help defeated countries get back on their feet, not punish them.

But there is no disguising the debt being paid with Serbia's stunning arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who hid for years beneath a heavy beard and an alternative-medicine practice in the high-rise outskirts of this city, and will likely be delivered to a United Nations war-crimes tribunal in the Hague this weekend.

For the families of the thousands killed in Europe's worst ethnic slaughters since the Holocaust, this was pure justice.

For the people who have struggled since 2000 to turn Serbia into a normal European state and bury the ideologies of the Milosevic era, the arrest meant something else.

The modern infrastructure of international law was practically invented in order to deal with the crimes committed under Mr. Karadzic. “Never again” was the message when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was launched. But, in a bleak paradox, the justice system turned into a punishment for those ordinary Serbs who had the greatest will to rescue their country from extremism.

A LAST GASP

Outside the bombed-out ruins of the defence ministry this week, hundreds of furious Serbs marched by, carrying images of Mr. Karadzic and the flags of Serbia's most popular political faction, the ultra-nationalist Radical Party, which was founded by ethnic-Serb firebrand Vojislav Seselj, who is also on trial in the Hague. The crowd turned angry and violent, beating the cameramen of Belgrade's democracy-minded B92 TV station so badly that he was sent to a hospital.

This crowd was doubly angry. They had lost their war hero, Mr. Karadzic, to what they consider a Serb-hating force of Western imperialism. And, worse, they had lost their power over Serbia.

The Radical Party had seemed poised for victory only a dozen weeks ago, after it won a record number of votes in the March elections. It was ready to join forces with other anti-European parties, with the backing of Moscow, and form a government built on Serbian fury over the loss of Kosovo, the southern province that declared independence this year.

Then, after three months of furious horse-trading, the Radicals were robbed: The democratic movement that had expelled Mr. Milosevic from office in 2000 had, to everyone's amazement, allied itself with the former strong man's own Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) to form a strange new government.

Around the corner, inside the drab back offices of the Serbian parliament, there was a mood of calm jubilation. The arrest of Mr. Karadzic was more than just a long-delayed blow for international justice, the ruling Democratic Party proudly explained. It was the start of something that was supposed to happen a decade ago.

“What we are doing now is part of a plan that we have had in place for 15 years, to bring Serbia back into Europe, and it is finally unfolding as we had hoped after years of difficulty,” says Gordana Comic, the brusque, outspoken chief strategist for Democratic Party leader Boris Tadic, who has been president since 2004 but saddled with parliaments dominated by parties that do not share his liberal, European-minded views.

“This is a very important moment,” she adds. “It is the first time in 400 years that a Serbian government has been made up entirely of parties that are working for success, rather than trying to bring each other down.”

This sort of crowing is partly justified: Serbia's new political coalition is indeed an act of political genius on the part of Mr. Tadic, as well as being a great bit of political theatre, a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat at the 11th hour.

The true brilliance of the move became apparent only this week, when Mr. Karadzic was rounded up by a security service that had seemed uninterested in the task for years. The new government's first act in office, almost, was to replace the head of the service and give early retirement to many of the old Milosevic loyalists who dominated its ranks. (It didn't hurt that the SPS was helping to make the offer.)

And the arrest had the delightful effect of turning a bizarre, extremely fragile coalition government into something permanent. Before, the SPS might have defeated the government on any vote. Now, its core voters – who are great admirers of Mr. Karadzic (and mostly senior citizens) – are furious with their leaders, who told me this week they now plan to wait four years, hope the economy improves enough to make Serbs happy again, and emerge as true, European-style social democrats.

But beneath this bold optimism lies the undeniable fact that almost half of all Serbs voted for extreme nationalist parties, and that the country, almost a decade after its popular movement expelled Europe's most dangerous hate figure, is closer than ever to the man's ideology.

Throughout the 1990s, it was often said that Mr. Milosevic was imposing a primitive ethnic nationalism on the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic voters of Yugoslavia. These days, it is better to say that Mr. Tadic and his colleagues are struggling to impose cosmopolitanism and openness on a population not at all happy with such concepts.

“The electorate here is divided exactly, half and half,” says Zoran Lucic, a pollster with the Belgrade-based Centre for Free Elections and Democracy. “It is completely polarized. That wasn't true when Milosevic left office, but it's true now. And that's not going to change in the near future.”

In Serbia's years as a semi-isolated pariah state, many Serbs, especially those born in the Milosevic years, have become deeply cynical about the liberal economy, Europe and the outside world, and have turned to the Radicals. But, notes Mr. Lucic, of the party's 1.2 million voters, only 500,000 to 600,000 are ethnic-Serb true believers. The rest – including most of the younger generation – appear willing to bend, if things improve.

Because Serbia's economy collapsed by 70 per cent in the Milosevic years, he explains, “we have so many poor people here with no future, but if the economy is going to improve substantially in the next four years, their political outlook could change quite a lot.”

That's a pattern repeated across the post-communist world: When things have gone well in the transition years (as in the Czech Republic and, recently, Poland), people have turned to moderate, open-economy parties. When they haven't (Russia being a prime example), voters have backed demagogues.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Serbia had good reason to expect something more optimistic after Oct. 5, 2000, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, drove bulldozers into government buildings and forced out Mr. Milosevic. Yes, Serbs had to overcome both the difficulties of transition from a Communist economy (which had been suspended during the wars of the 1990s) and the shame of accounting for their country's war guilt.

But most people expected those two things to stay separate. Countries coming out of periods of tyranny, whether Germany in the 1950s or South Africa in the 1990s, have to endure economic reconstruction and political atonement at the same time. But in Serbia, the one ended up affecting the other.

More by default than design, its neighbours decided that Serbia's economic development – specifically its trade and aid ties to Europe and the rights of its citizens to travel freely – would be contingent on atoning for its sins. In fact, the European Union ruled it would not qualify for EU membership, or even the important funding that comes with potential membership, until it had coughed up people such as Mr. Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, his notorious military leader.

“After 2000, everybody expected that Europe would be more open to us, and trust us more,” says Radomir Diklic, a dissident writer who became a Democratic Party official and is now Serbia's ambassador to Brussels.

“It was worse than having to pay war reparations. If they'd said at the end of the Milosevic regime, ‘Okay, you've lost the war, your conditions are this and that,' then fine. But what they said was, ‘It's okay, you're our friends now, it's finished.' But then they told us that we'd be isolated until these other things happen.

“So Romania and Bulgaria, which are less developed in many ways, have got full membership in the EU immediately, and we were isolated. Why?”

It is not as though Serbia was ignored completely. In fact, a small Marshall Plan – many millions from Canada and billions from Europe and the United States – has rebuilt its infrastructure and government institutions. Mr. Diklic is right to say that Serbia's public bodies are more accountable and well-run than those of some existing EU members: We created them.

Across Belgrade, important buildings bear the logos of EU and UN development bodies and U.S. State Department organizations. Take a drive across the country, and you'll see foreign investment flooding into its privatized industries. Canada's companies put $250-million to $300-million a year into Serbia; as one Canadian boasts, a fifth of the milk Belgrade drinks is produced by a Vancouver-owned agribusiness company.

And yet the people themselves were left with little to show for the risk they had taken. They were, in effect, paying war reparations. History-minded Europeans should have remembered the experience of Germany after the First World War, when the burden of reparations and the isolation of the people led to even greater extremism.

KILLER CATCH-22

But because Serbia's isolation was being imposed in the name of justice, it seemed like a good idea. Within Serbia, however,the approach created a deadly Catch-22.

Zoran Djindjic, the democracy-movement hero who became the first post-Milosevic president, soon discovered he couldn't just round up the war-crimes suspects because the security services remained in the control of Milosevic loyalists.

At great risk, he was able to deliver Mr. Milosevic to the Hague, but then the secret service turned against him – they were protecting the fugitives, not seeking them. And his governing coalition contained parties, including the nationalist DSS under Vojislav Kostunica, that did not seem interested in solving the problem.

Rather than heal the wounds, Mr. Djindjic discovered, time just made things worse: As Serbia's economy continued to deteriorate, people began to turn to the old SPS of Mr. Milosevic or the DSS of Mr. Kostunica, if not the even more extreme Radicals. The isolation was driving Serbs back to the extremism they had so recently escaped.

In the end, the Catch-22 consumed Mr. Djindjic. In 2003, he was assassinated in downtown Belgrade by Milosevic loyalists.

After that, the situation froze – until Kosovo seceded. Its independence was inevitable, and possibly necessary, but the timing could not have been worse. Ordinary Serbs took to the streets, the country appeared to be on the brink, and Europe panicked.

Mr. Kostunica, the increasingly anti-Europe prime minister, decided to call an election over Kosovo, and offered voters a deal: They could get a coalition government made of moderate and extreme nationalists, turn their backs on Europe, and join the Russian community that had bolstered Yugoslavia in Communist times.

In previous elections, European and U.S. officials had, in essence, threatened voters by suggesting that only by supporting the right people would nice things happen for them. Tired of seeing nothing change, Serbs had ceased to believe them.

As a result, they finally became an international priority. EU official Javier Solana (he's essentially the federation's foreign minister) travelled to Belgrade and, against all precedent, initialled a “stabilization and association” agreement, the key first step toward full EU membership.

Serbia wasn't supposed to get one of these until its war-crimes suspects had been handed over, but this was a crisis (even if some members, notably the Dutch, whose peacekeepers had been humiliated during the Srebrenica massacre, disagreed).

Mr. Kostunica, of course, denounced the move, declaring that “we have just sold out to Europe,” accusing President Tadic of being a stooge for Western interests and vowing to nullify the agreement. The election seemed to have become a real showdown: Russia or Europe.

Then, to the immense surprise of Mr. Kostunica and the relief of many others, voters seemed to turn away from his DSS and became polarized, like Americans, between two parties: the Democrats and the Radicals.

And how did the SPS suddenly become democracy's kingmaker?

Rather than being the handiwork of those who'd left the Serbs in limbo, the transformation followed a secret visit to Belgrade by Greek Socialist leader George Papandreou. He persuaded the SPS that, as the second-tier nationalist party with an unpleasant past and an uncertain future, it had nothing to lose by gambling on becoming a European-style, centre-left movement. With most of their old guard on trial, dead or missing, this appealed to a new generation of SPS leaders.

In effect, Mr. Papandreou persuaded Mr. Milosevic's old party to believe something others in the West seemed unable to acknowledge: that the Serbian people can change, if given the opportunity. Thanks to his efforts and those of Mr. Tadic, this week may well be remembered as the moment when Serbs stopped being bitter and began to take part in the world.

Doug Saunders is a London-based member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.