Mastermind of Bosnian Muslims murder Karadzic arrested

[muse]

Mastermind of Bosnian Muslims’ murder Karadzic arrested


Updated at: 0230 PST, Tuesday, July 22, 2008
BELGRADE: Radovan Karadzic, the mastermind of Bosnian Muslims’ killing, was arrested in Serbia on Monday. He is seen widely as a murderous megalomaniac with a twisted view of history and his supposed destiny as a leader of the Bosnian Serbs.

Karadzic was involved in the killing of thousands of Muslims and was abducted for the last 13 years on the run from the UN war crimes tribunal.

According to a statement issued from the office of Serbian President Boris Tadic, Serbian security officers arrested Radovan Karadzic, who was brought to the investigative judge of the War Crimes Court in Belgrade.

Along with his former military commander Ratko Mladic, Karadzic had evaded the ICTY since 1995 when they were charged with war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war. Mladic is still at large.

The Bosnian Croats and Muslims, against whom Karadzic, 63, waged a barbaric ampaign of "ethnic cleansing" in the early 1990s, have no doubt that he is one of the monsters of the 20th century.

The worst crimes on his indictment are the 43-month siege of Sarajevo in which some 10,000 civilians were killed, and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

 

[ejaz007]

Hopefully justice will be served. He deserves no mercy and should be given the sentence keeping in view his crimes against humanity.

 

[muse]

Bosnian Serb under arrest in war crimes
By Dan Bilefsky and Marlise Simons

Tuesday, July 22, 2008
PARIS: Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested Monday in a raid in Serbia that ended a 13-year hunt.

Serge Brammertz, the prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, hailed the arrest as an important step in bringing to justice one of the architects of Europe's worst massacre since World War II. He said Karadzic, 63, the Bosnian Serb president during the war there between 1992 and 1995, would be transferred to The Hague in "due course."

"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade," Brammertz said. "It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice."

Karadzic's exact place of arrest was not announced, but Serbian government officials said he was arrested by the Serbian secret police not far from Belgrade, the capital. Officials from President Boris Tadic's office said Karadzic had appeared before an investigative judge at Serbia's war crimes court, a prerequisite for his extradition to The Hague.

Karadzic, a nationalist hero among Serbian radicals and one of the tribunal's most-wanted criminals for more than a decade, is said to have eluded arrest so long by shaving his swoopy gray hair and disguising himself in an Serbian Orthodox priest. His reported hide-outs in caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and in monasteries. Before his political career, he was a medical doctor who worked as a psychiatrist in Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital.

Officials in The Hague and for the European Union have long suspected that he was, in fact, hiding in Serbia, and have pressed Belgrade to hand him over. The failure to arrest Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the still fugitive Bosnian Serb general also indicted on war crimes, long stood as a block to greater Serbian ties to the European Union after the wars in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

"This is a historic event," said Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the agreements in Dayton, Ohio to end the war in Bosnia in 1995. "Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic, and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the worst. The reason was that Karadzic was a real racist believer. Karadzic really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milosevic was an opportunist."

Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Serbia allied with Karadzic and Mladic, was arrested in 2001 and put on trial for war crimes in 2002. He died in 2006 before a verdict.

Holbrooke said that despite Karadzic's arrest, Serbia's responsibility was not over. "They have to capture Mladic," he said.

On Monday night after the arrest, armed police officers were deployed near the war crimes court in Belgrade, where about 50 nationalist supporters of Karadzic gathered, waving Serbian flags and chanting, "Save Serbia, and kill yourself Tadic." Several protesters were arrested after attacking journalists. Karadzic's brother, Luka, was also seen arriving at the courthouse.

Serbian officials said the police were also dispatched to protect the United States Embassy, which was set ablaze in February by an angry mob protesting Kosovo's declaration of independence.

The arrest, more than a decade after Karadzic went into hiding, marks the culmination of a long and protracted effort by the West to press Serbia to arrest Karadzic for the massacres in the southeastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, in the most heinous crime committed during the Balkan wars.

It came just weeks after a new pro-Western coalition government in Serbia was formed whose overriding goal is to bring Serbia into the European Union, the world's biggest trading bloc. The European Union has made delivering indicted war criminals to The Hague a precondition for Serbia's membership.

The arrest was hailed by Western diplomats as proof of Serbia's determination to link its future to the West and put the virulent nationalism of the past behind it. The capture under the stewardship of the new government has particular resonance because the government is made up of an unlikely alliance between the Democrats of Tadic and the Socialist Party of Milosevic, which fought a war against the West in the 1990s, but has now vowed to bring Serbia back into the Western fold.

In a sign that the move would accelerate Serbia's path to the European Union, the bloc's official in charge of expansion, Olli Rehn, said Monday that Karadzic's arrest was a "milestone" that would help clear the way for the poor Balkan nation to join.

"It proves the determination of the new government to achieve full cooperation with the tribunal," he said. He said he and European Union foreign ministers would meet with Serbia's foreign minister Vuk Jeremic in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss accelerated ties with Serbia.

The White House said the arrest of the wartime leader marked "an important demonstration of the Serbian government's determination to honor its commitment to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia." "There is no better tribute to the victims of the war's atrocities than bringing their perpetrators to justice," it said.

The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted the former leader on July 24, 1995, just days after thousands of unarmed Bosnian men were executed in and around Srebrenica, a United Nations-protected enclave which was overrun by the Bosnian Serb military and the police. Their forces were assisted closely by Serbian troops sent by Belgrade.

The prosecution charged him with genocide, persecution, deportation and other crimes committed against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war.

He was indicted together with his chief military commander, Mladic, who is also believed to be in Serbia.

Natasha Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, a leading human rights advocate, said by telephone at her home, just moments after hearing the news: "I'm still in shock. This is historic news. Nobody believed anymore this would be possible. I was sure Karadzic was under the protection of the church."

Kandic said she had been in touch with friends in Sarajevo, in Bosnia, who were still incredulous after hearing arrest rumors for so many years. "They are saying they cannot and dare not believe it," she said. "Finally the victims can be satisfied."

Richard Dicker, a director of Human Rights Watch in New York and a veteran of monitoring war crimes cases, called the arrest a landmark. "With this, the long arms of the law just grew longer and more muscular."

Karadzic's wife, Ljiljana, told The Associated Press by phone from her home near Sarajevo that she had been alerted about the arrest by her daughter Sonja, who called her before midnight. "As the phone rang, I knew something was wrong," she said. "I'm shocked. Confused. At least now, we know he is alive."

Even though indicted by the United Nations tribunal, he was often seen in and around Pale, his stronghold in Bosnia, but vanished from view after 1997. Until then, NATO troops stationed in the area often had the chance to arrest him but claimed that they had no arrest orders, despite the international warrant issued against him.

Later, when NATO began to look for him in earnest, he moved around the mountainous regions of Bosnia and in neighboring Montenegro where he was born. Although Washington and others offered rewards for information leading to his capture, Karadzic seemed protected by his status as a Serbian hero.

The former leader is charged with genocide for the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. The indictment charges that Karadzic also committed genocide, persecutions and other crimes when forces under his command killed non-Serbs during and after attacks on towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, rounded up thousands of non-Serbs and transferred them to camps set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities.

The charges state that forces under Karadzic's command killed, tortured, mistreated, and sexually assaulted non-Serbs in these camps.

Further, he is charged with responsibility for the shelling and sniping of civilians in Sarajevo, during the 43-month siege of the city, which led to the killing and wounding of thousands, including many women and children.

 

[EagleEyes]

Can you give better titles to these threads.

Its a request.

Arrested. Who is arrested?

Thanks.

 

[muse]

I'm not sure I know how to edit the title of the thread - will try but not a problem with me if ou or any of the mods put a better title to it

 

[muse]

For Bosnian Serb, a life of hiding in plain sight
By Graham Bowley Published: July 23, 2008

He grew long white hair and a flowing white beard, and, as Dragan Dabic, the former psychiatrist worked for years in a clinic in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, as a practitioner of alternative medicine. He even lectured at local community centers.

"How convincing his false identity was, we can tell you that he has been freely walking in the city, " said Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, on Tuesday. "Even the people he rented a flat from were unaware of who he was."

The secret life was very different from his years as the outspoken, clean-shaven leader — with a prominent square jaw and a distinctive shock of grey hair — of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1990s.

But on Monday his false identity was broken, his mask pulled away, and secret police officers arrested Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

He had been sought by international prosecutors since he vanished from view in 1996.

All along, he was said to have eluded arrest by disguising himself as a Serbian Orthodox priest and by hiding out in caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and in monasteries.

But details provided by Serbian officials for the first time on Tuesday showed that, at least for some of those years, one of the accused architects of Europe's worst massacre since World War II had been hiding in Serbia in plain sight.

Serbian officials said he had transformed his identity and appearance so successfully that he was able to walk out freely in public. He used false documents and false identities, and most recently lived in New Belgrade, a working class neighborhood of the capital that is known as a stronghold of Serbia's radical far-right party.

Why the arrest occurred now is not clear. But just weeks ago, on July 7, a new pro-Western coalition government was formed in Serbia whose overriding goal is to bring Serbia into the European Union, the world's biggest trading bloc. The European Union, meanwhile, has made delivering indicted war criminals to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague a precondition for Serbia's membership, and has been particularly scathing about the continued liberty of Karadzic.

Last week, European Union peacekeepers, with support of local police, raided the Sarajevo apartment of Ljiljana Karadzic, the ex-politician's wife. They seized documents and materials as clues for their search. In recent weeks, homes of other known supporters of Karadzic were also searched.

Then on Monday, police officers began to follow Karadzic for several hours from mid-afternoon until the evening, until they swooped. There were rumors of the involvement of a foreign secret service but this was vehemently denied by the Serbian government. The exact location of Karadzic's arrest was not disclosed, but government officials said he was apprehended by Serbian secret police "as he traveled from one location to the other" not far from Belgrade.

A judge concluded that he should be transferred to the tribunal in The Hague, although Karadzic now has three days in which to appeal the decision. Karadzic had been questioned but, so far, ministers said, he had remained silent.

Marlise Simons contributed reporting from The Hague, Dan Bilefsky from Belgrade and Alan Cowell from Paris.

 

[muse]

RADOVAN KARADZIC
Genocide's epic hero
By Aleksandar Hemon Published: July 27, 2008


CHICAGO:

On Oct. 14, 1991, Radovan Karadzic spoke at a session of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the rump Yugoslavia. Karadzic was there to warn the parliament members against following the Slovenes and Croats, who had broken away earlier that year, down "the highway of hell and suffering."

He thundered, "Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here." Throughout his tirade, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his audience, but then let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word "annihilation." The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

It was a spectacular, if bloodcurdling, performance. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the parliament, nor did he hold any elective office.

His very presence rendered the parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People's Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the parliament represented.

Watching the news broadcast covering the session, neither my parents nor I could comprehend what he meant by "annihilation." What he was saying was well outside the scope of our imagination, well beyond the habits of normalcy we desperately clung to as war loomed over our lives.

Then I understood that he was wagging the stick of genocide at the Bosnian Muslims, while the unappetizing carrot was their bare survival. "Don't make me do it," he was essentially saying. "I will be at home in the hell I create for you."

The parliament eventually decided a referendum was the way to go. It took place in February 1992; the Serbs boycotted it while the majority of Bosnians voted for independence. In March, there were barricades on the streets of Sarajevo and shooting in the mountains surrounding it. In April, Karadzic's snipers aimed at a peaceful anti-war demonstration in front of the parliament building, and two women were killed. On May 2, Sarajevo was cut off from the world, and the longest siege in modern history began. By the end of the summer, nearly every front page in the world had published a picture from a Serbian death camp.

There is little doubt, of course, that Karadzic would have happily sped down the hell-and-suffering highway regardless of the outcome of the parliamentary session. The annihilation machine was already revving; everything had already been put in place for genocide, whose purpose was not only the destruction and displacement of Bosnian Muslims but also the irreversible unification of the Serbs and their ethnically pure lands into a Greater Serbia. I wondered later why he staged that performance before the parliament, since peace and coexistence were never a possibility for him. Why did he bother?

The point of that performance, I eventually concluded, was the performance itself. Karadzic was already cast in the role he would perform throughout the war, up until his 1996 ouster from the Serbian political leadership and his subsequent life on the run. His performance was far less for the beleaguered Bosnian parliament than for the patriotic Serbs watching the broadcast, ready to embark upon an epic project that would require sacrifice, murder and ethnic cleansing.

Karadzic was showing to his people that he was a tough and determined leader, yet neither unwise nor unreasonable. He was indicating that war would not be a rash decision on his part, while he was capable of recognizing the inevitable necessity of genocide. If there was a job to be done, he was going to do it unflinchingly and ruthlessly. He was the leader who was going to lead them through the hell of murder to the land where honor and salvation awaited.

The model for Karadzic's role as leader was provided by Petar Petrovic Njegos' epic poem "The Mountain Wreath" ("Gorski vijenac"). Published in 1847, it is deeply embedded in the tradition of Serbian epic poetry and is a foundational text of Serbian cultural nationalism. Set at the end of the 17th century, its central character is Vladika Danilo, the bishop and the sovereign of Montenegro, the only Serbian territory unconquered at the time by the powerful and all-encroaching Ottoman Empire. Vladika Danilo has a problem: Some Montenegrin Serbs have converted to Islam. For him, they are the fifth column of the Turks, a people who could never be trusted, a permanent threat to the freedom of the Serbs.

He summons a council to help him determine the solution. He listens to the advice of his bloodthirsty warriors: "Without suffering no saber is forged," one of then says. He listens to a delegation of Muslims pleading for peace, who are instead offered the chance to save their heads by converting back to "the faith of their forefathers." He speaks of freedom and the difficult decisions it requires:

"The wolf is entitled to a sheep

Much like a tyrant to a feeble man.

But to stomp the neck of tyranny

To lead it to the righteous knowledge

That is man's most sacred duty."

In the lines familiar to nearly every Serbian child and adult, Vladika Danilo recognizes that the total, ruthless extermination of the Muslims is the only way: "Let there be endless struggle," he says. "Let there be what cannot be." He will lead his people through the hell of murder and onward to honor and salvation

Karadzic was intimately familiar with Serbian epic poetry. He clearly understood his role in the light cast by Vladika Danilo. He saw himself as the hero in an epic poem that would be sung by a distant future generation. The tragic, heartbreaking irony of it all is that Karadzic played out his historical role in less than 10 years. In the flash of his infernal pan hundreds of thousands died, millions were displaced, untold numbers paid in unspeakable pain for his induction into the pantheon of Serbian epic poetry.

Before he became the leader of Bosnian Serbs and after he was forced out by his supporter and fellow nationalist, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia, in the wake of the Dayton peace accord, Karadzic was a prosaic nobody. A mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet and a petty embezzler before the war, at the time of his arrest he was a grotesque mountebank. It was only during the war, on a blood-soaked stage, that he could fully develop his inhuman potential. His true and only home was the hell he created for others.

Which is why many Bosnians find Karadzic's arrest less satisfying than one would expect. Though he might spend the rest of his life in the comfortable dungeons of the Western European prison system, he will live eternally in the verses of decasyllabic meter written by those for whom the demolition of Bosnia was but material for the grand epic poetry of Serbhood.

Bosnians know he should have been booed off the stage at the peak of his performance. He should have been seen for what he really was: a thuggish puppet whose head was bloated with delusions of grandeur. He should have let us live outside his epic fantasies.

Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author, most recently, of "The Lazarus Project," a novel.

 

[ejaz007]

‘Karadzic lived under CIA protection until he broke deal’

* Newspaper claims CIA withdrew protection after former Bosnian-Serb leader broke ‘secret deal’ to stay out of politics

FORMER Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic lived under the protection of the United States after the Dayton peace accords until the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intercepted a phone call in which he broke the terms of a “secret deal” to stay out of politics, claims a Serbian newspaper.

“Karadzic, indicted for genocide and war crimes, was under US protection until 2000, when the CIA intercepted his telephone conversation that clearly proved that he personally chaired a meeting of his old political party,” the Belgrade daily Blic quoted a “well-informed US intelligence source” as saying. “They went crazy when they realised that Karadzic was making a fool of them,” it said yesterday, adding, “The US and CIA then withdrew [his] informal protection.” Karadzic has revived the allegations of a deal between himself and Richard Holbrooke, the chief US peace negotiator in Bosnia, since appearing before the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague last Thursday. Holbrooke has denied any deals with Karadzic, telling CNN last Thursday that this was a “flat-out lie”.

“He’s been spreading it for 12 years through his friends, now he’s making it personally. It would have been morally reprehensible and illegal to do such a thing. We made no deal,” said Holbrooke. However, statements by two top officials of the former warring sides seem to confirm the deal. Former Bosnian-Serb foreign minister Aleksa Buha told Belgrade Radio that he had witnessed the agreement. He said the deal had been made “on the night between July 18 and 19, 1996”. Former Bosnian foreign minister Mohamed Sacirbey told the Mostar paper Dnevni that he had learnt about the deal through the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s head of mission, the US diplomat Robert Frowick, in the summer of 1996. courtesy the independent

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\08\06\story_6-8-2008_pg4_4