The anniversary of Karadzic’s arrest

When the Berlin Wall, the ultimate emblem of the Cold War and European division, symbolically fell in November 1989, it appeared to herald a new age of peace, prosperity and optimism.

However, less then two years later, a bloody inter-ethnic war erupted in Yugoslavia, casting a long shadow across the entire continent. The darkness has slowly dissipated in subsequent years, but has never fully lifted over Bosnia Herzegovina.

The expression ‘ethnic cleansing’ has become part of our everyday language thanks to a Serbo-Croat phrase associated with the events in the former Yugoslavia, where the Muslim population of Bosnia Herzegovina were a target of systematic elimination.

‘Ethnic cleansing’ encapsulates the brutality of the conflict where the principal aim was to erase all traces of a culture, and this directive was led by the Bosnian-Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, and his military collaborator, Ratko Mladic.

Despite 11 indictments of war crimes by the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague, Karadzic tried to hide in Belgrade behind a long white beard and a life as a practitioner of alternative medicine, under the pseudonym of Dragan Dabic.

This day last July, Karadzic was arrested, and will now finally explain his actions to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which is currently at the pre-trial stage of his impending trial.

But Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian-Serb army, remains free, despite 15 indictments for war crimes, including ordering the mass murder of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.

This event drew widespread condemnation from the international community, who had previously failed to take appropriate action to prevent such genocide, during the conflict in Bosnia, which lasted from 1992 to 1995.

That failure to act resulted in the deaths of at least 96,000 innocent victims, yet Mladic, now aged 67, has remained on the run for 14 years, even though his capture is deemed a necessity if Serbia wants a preliminary deal towards EU membership.

Colm Doyle is a former Colonel in the Irish Defence Forces, and was the personal representative to Lord Carrington, who chaired a European Community International Peace Conference during the conflict.

Most of Doyle’s mandate was spent in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, where he met Karadzic on numerous occasions, and will now testify at his trail in The Hague. Although he never met Mladic, Doyle was not surprised when he learned of the reports of genocide, carried out by the Bosnian-Serb army.

“I never encountered Ratko Mladic but I was aware of who, and what he was and the fact that the UN didn’t provide the required protection is inexcusable,” he said. “It was known that there were mass graves all over Bosnia, and that Mladic’s army were slaughtering the people.

“I was concerned that the UN declared some Muslim enclaves as ‘safe havens,’ without giving the required backup of troops to make sure the people in these areas were safe.”

It is widely suspected that Mladic was protected in Serbia by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic and went into hiding after his death. The former Serbian president was overthrown in 2000 and died in custody while awaiting trial at The Hague in 2006.

“I don’t know if Mladic is living openly or in seclusion, but if his location is revealed, how strong is the will of Belgrade and the international community to arrest him?” said Doyle.

“From what I know of Mladic’s personality and character, he is more likely to kill himself, if he was revealed to the authorities, and that leads me to believe that he will never be caught- alive that is,” added Doyle.

Last month, Bosnian public television broadcast a home video of Mladic and his family in Serbia, which seems to undermine Belgrade’s claim that it cannot locate him. Zdenko Stanar, a Bosnian citizen from Sarajevo, established his life in Ireland after his family fled Sarajevo during the 43 month siege of the city. He believes that the recently published video confirms that Serbian authorities have always known where Mladic is hiding, but have not moved to detain him.

“This is the same as Karadzic’s situation, he was working and living in Belgrade, and the recent footage of Mladic also shows him living freely in Serbia, acting like any normal person,” he said.

Stanar thinks that the most high-profile war criminals will die before being brought to justice.

“I’m not sure that Mladic will live long enough to serve a sentence if he is caught,” he said. “The same will happen to Karadzic, who will not live to serve out a full sentence at The Hague,” said Stanar.

“Milosevic died in custody, so the ICTY has to act faster, and speed up the trial because Bosnian victims of the war must receive justice,” he said. “Every family in Bosnia lost somebody in the war, and it’s very hard to live with that while the culprits of genocide are free,” added Stanar.

The ICTY has made 60 convictions, and proceedings are ongoing against 41 individuals. Only Mladic and the former political leader of the Serb entity in Coatia, Goran Hadzic, have not faced justice since the court’s establishment in 1993.

Spokesperson for the prosecution at the ICTY, Olga Kavran, emphasised the “paramount importance” of Mladic’s arrest for the Tribunal to “successfully complete its mandate.”

“Mladic is charged with some of the most serious crimes known to humanity and yet he has been evading justice for 14 years,” she said. “He must be arrested and brought before the Tribunal,” said Kavran.

However, Mladic is a difficult individual to locate, as his capture would “cause a revolt against the Serbian president, Boris Tadic,” according to the Serbian human rights lawyer, Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco.

She founded a human rights committee in Belgrade, and is critical of the Serbian authorities conflicting reports made to the ICTY, concerning Mladic’s arrest.

“Serbia’s chairman of the National ICTY Cooperation Council is promising that Mladic will be ‘arrested and transferred to The Hague by the end of the year’, while simultaneously underlying that they do not know his whereabouts,” she said.

“There is a grave political problem in Serbia and there is no consensus as to whether Mladic should be apprehended or not,” she said. “His arrest would cause great turbulence in Serbian politics.

“Apart from that, Mladić’s arrest would substantially help throw additional light on Serbia’s involvement in the war, and the extent of war crimes committed,” she said. This represents yet another major obstacle on the way to his arrest.”

This article was first printed in the Irish Examiner in 2009