A decade after he melted away into the mountains and monasteries of the Balkans, Radovan Karadzic reappeared in Serbia last night, hauled before a special war crimes magistrate in Belgrade.
In a dramatic denouement, the 63-year-old former Bosnian Serb leader was arrested after Serbian special forces swooped on one of the world’s most wanted and most notorious figures. He is to be transferred to a cell on the North Sea to be tried for genocide, the gravest crime possible.
The political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war and the architect of the worst atrocities in Europe for generations, Karadzic is virtually certain to become the first European to be found guilty of genocide if, unlike his mentor, Slobodan Milosevic, who died in UN custody two years ago, he sees out his trial at the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
That the Serbian forces under Karadzic’s command committed genocide against the Muslims of Srebrenica in July 1995 is an established legal fact. Karadzic and his military sidekick, General Ratko Mladic, still at large, were the two masterminds of the campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing aimed at purging at least half of Bosnia of most non-Serbs.
The results were 100,000 dead, two million non-Serbs driven from their homes, rape licensed as a tactic of terror and humiliation, a country destroyed, and, in the final weeks of the war, the mass murder within a couple of weeks of almost 8,000 Muslim males in an act of genocide.
Karadzic sought to seize much of Bosnia and destroy what he could neither claim nor keep, including the city of Sarajevo which he moved to as a teenager from his native land, neighbouring Montenegro.
Richard Goldstone of South Africa, the Hague tribunal’s first chief prosecutor, indicted Karadzic for war crimes in 1995, charging him with 16 counts that ranged from taking UN peacekeepers hostage to the long siege of Sarajevo that left thousands of civilians killed by snipers and random bombardment, to the systematic violence against non-Serbs and the establishment of a mini-gulag of camps where appalling cruelties were inflicted.
"From April 1992, in the territory of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by their acts and omissions, [Karadzic and Mladic] committed genocide," read the chargesheet.
"Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilians were persecuted on national, political and religious grounds. Thousands of them were interned in detention facilities where they were subjected to widespread acts of physical and psychological abuse and to inhumane conditions. Detention facility personnel intended to destroy Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat people as national, ethnic or religious groups and killed, seriously injured and deliberately inflicted upon them conditions intended to bring about their physical destruction."
The indictment was later revised into 15 counts on which Karadzic will now stand trial.
For 13 years Karadzic’s absence has shamed Nato, made a mockery of international justice, embarrassed the international powers and crippled Serbia’s ambivalent attempts to integrate with the rest of the democratic world.
Last night’s drama was a coup for the new pro-western Serbian regime of President Boris Tadic and a strong signal of a seismic political shift in Belgrade. For years under the previous nationalist government of Vojislav Kostunica, Belgrade promised much and delivered little.
Under the new government, only weeks in office, Serbia has a new "action team" for cooperating with the Hague tribunal and a new security services chief. The policy shifts being engineered by Tadic came into sharp focus last night and the arrest was promptly applauded by senior officials in Brussels and Paris, at Nato and at the tribunal in The Hague. EU foreign ministers meeting tomorrow will probably move to reward Belgrade quickly.
The warlord, poet, psychiatrist and compulsive gambler who relished his years in the limelight hobnobbing with English lords, French generals and American diplomats, believed he could lie low for long enough to avoid the dock and most suspected he would cheat justice.
The surprise was even greater last night. It has long been believed that Mladic is in Serbia, but not Karadzic, and the international pressure on Serbia to make the arrest has concentrated on the general rather than the "president" of the Republika Srpska or Serbian Republic that Karadzic carved out of Bosnia through more than 40 months of ethnic pogroms.
Karadzic was the central political figure in the Serbian project in Bosnia from the very start. In 1989, as communist Yugoslavia began to collapse and Milosevic rose to power, Karadzic founded the Serbian Democratic party in Bosnia, Belgrade’s political instrument in Bosnia for implementing its "Greater Serbia" programme.
By early 1992, months before the war started but well into the war in neighbouring Croatia, Karadzic had been declared president of the Serbian Republic in Bosnia, a campaign of partition had been launched and Karadzic, backed by Belgrade and the Yugoslav army, launched his land grab.
When the war started in 1992, Karadzic was central to the whirlwind of violence that ensued, yielding the Serbs control of almost two-thirds of Bosnia in six months, partitioning Sarajevo, and embarking on a three-year siege of the main part of the city not controlled by the Serbs.
By the end of the war, Karadzic was an international pariah disowned by Milosevic, who was engaged in cementing his gains through an American-brokered peace deal. Within a year of the end of the war, Karadzic had been persuaded to resign from the Bosnian Serb leadership and went into hiding as one of the world’s most wanted men.
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Radovan Karadzic: What happens next?
The UN’s war crimes tribunal will have learned from the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, which dragged on until he died. But Karadzic now knows how to delay proceedings
Mark Tran – The Guardian Tuesday July 22, 2008http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/22/radovankaradzic.warcrimes
In the next few days, Radovan Karadzic, one of the most wanted men from the Bosnia war, should find himself in The Hague.
A Serbian war crimes prosecutor has ordered the transfer of Karadzic, an elusive quarry for 13 years, to be transferred to the UN’s international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
An investigating judge, Milan Dilparic, said: "The questioning is over."
Karadzic, accused of masterminding Europe’s worst massacre since the second world war, has three days to appeal any decision to extradite him to the UN court in The Hague, Netherlands, but court officials are waiting for him to be transferred. "We want him sooner rather than later," one said.
Upon his arrival, the legal machinery will crank-up for the man who has been on the tribunal’s most-wanted list for more than a decade, alongside Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander also indicted for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Karadzic will first undergo a medical examination before the court sorts out his legal representation. This can be a tricky issue and can provide the first opportunity for feet-dragging.
The current trial of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president, for alleged war crimes at The Hague was held up for months when he sacked his defence team at the opening of his case and boycotted the special UN-backed court, saying he wanted stronger legal representation.
Between them, the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Karadzic will decide whether the court will provide him a temporary attorney or whether he wants his own lawyers.
The tribunal has twice indicted Karadzic on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The most serious indictment is for crimes committed in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops detained and executed about 8,000 men and boys.
Once legal representation is sorted, Karadzic will appear before the court where he has the right to hear the charges against him and decide whether to enter a plea. If not, he will have another 30 days to appear again to enter a plea. If he refuses once again, a not guilty plea will be entered for him.
So the scope for prevarication – something that the former president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, was adept at exploiting – is already present at this early stage. Milosevic’s trial dragged out for four years, not helped by lengthy pauses for ill health, although Milosevic probably used the issue of his health to drag out the trial.
The trial court, on doctors’ orders, held proceedings only three half-days a week and his histrionics – he represented himself – prolonged the proceedings even further.
"The health of the accused [Milosevic] and that he was self-represented contributed to the length of the trial," said Olga Kazran, a spokesperson for the prosecutor at The Hague. "The trial only took place three half-days a week and there were numerous breaks. We hope this won’t happen again."
The court made matters difficult for itself in the Milosevic case. The judges combined three separate indictments – related to alleged crimes in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia – to create one massive trial on 66 counts.
The result was a complex trial involving volumes of testimony, documentation and witness statements. In the end, there was no verdict as Milosevic died during the course of the trial.
Presumably, lessons will have been learned by prosecutors and judges from the Milosevic trial to minimise delays. The flipside, though, is that Karadzic will also have learned his own lessons to spin things out as long as possible.
For the time being, however, western policy makers and human rights officials have reason to be satisfied that a war crimes suspect who managed to evade capture for over a decade is at last behind bars.
"Radovan Karadzic personified impunity for more than a decade, but his efforts to run the clock on justice have failed," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s international justice programme. "This arrest offers hope to the victims of the horrific crimes that occurred there. We welcome this long-overdue arrest and look forward to his fair trial in The Hague."