Long-sought war crimes suspect caught in Serbia

BELGRADE, SERBIA —  Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of a campaign of ethnic mass murder and a war crimes fugitive for more than a decade, was captured Monday by Serbian security forces, officials said.

Indicted on multiple charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, Karadzic for years eluded NATO forces and myriad investigators seeking to bring him to justice. He served as president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb Republic and came to symbolize the repression of an entire population of Bosnian Muslims.

Karadzic, now 63, is accused, among other crimes, of overseeing the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, the largest atrocity in post-World War II Europe.

The regime he led is accused of enacting a policy that came to be known as ethnic cleansing -- driving Muslim civilians from their homes, torching the land, killing and raping those who resisted. An estimated 200,000 people on all sides of the conflict died.

In addition to genocide, Karadzic faces charges of extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts and other crimes against Muslim, Croat and other non-Serb Bosnian civilians. The indictment alleges that men acting under his orders set up detention camps where women were imprisoned and raped, men beaten and starved.

He was indicted by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995, as the three-year Bosnian war came to an end, and quickly dropped from public sight. With his arrest, he is likely to be dispatched to the court in The Hague within days.

Serbia gave protection to Karadzic while the war’s mastermind, Slobodan Milosevic, ruled in Belgrade, the capital. But the country is moving closer to the West and has been under pressure to cooperate with the tribunal in the Netherlands. It was the office of Serbia’s pro-West president, Boris Tadic, eager to curry European favor, that announced Karadzic’s arrest.

“We all thought this was impossible,” Natasa Kandic, a prominent human rights activist who documented many of the war’s atrocities, said late Monday.

“This is a historic day,” said Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who brokered the so-called Dayton accords that ended the war.

Karadzic, a psychiatrist by profession easily recognizable by his mop of gray-streaked hair, was a hero to many Serbs who believed he was fighting to defend them from forces that would erode Serbian dominance.

Flamboyant and egotistical, he wrapped himself in the flag and Orthodox Christianity, stoking his people’s prejudices and fears. A mythology grew up around him, fed by his ability to elude capture. There were numerous rumors of where and how he was hiding -- ensconced, perhaps, in a stone-walled monastery; dressed, people would say, as a monk or a woman.

Fears of a backlash from Serbian nationalists who revered Karadzic haunted those who might have arrested him long ago, including the thousands of troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who patrolled postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Late Monday and early today, as news of Karadzic’s arrest spread, Serbian police in riot gear deployed in parts of Belgrade -- in main squares, outside the U.S. Embassy and at the courthouse where he was rumored to be detained.

Nationalists shouting slogans in support of Karadzic and hurling insults at police and Tadic cruised in cars through downtown. No violence was reported. Police arrested several protesters.

It was not clear, however, that the anger would rise to the level seen earlier this year when the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo seceded from Serbia. Many Serbs regarded Karadzic as a remnant of their nation’s former status as a pariah unable to gain full integration into Europe, and they were glad to be rid of him.

Reflecting the domestic sensitivity of the arrest, few details were released Monday on where and how Karadzic was found in Belgrade. He was “located and arrested,” Tadic’s office said, “in an operation by Serbian security forces.” The Interior Ministry, dominated by old-regime holdouts, quickly issued a statement denying involvement.

In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, where the worst of the fighting raged, people took to the streets in celebration late Monday and early today. Many saw a long overdue justice in the detention of Karadzic.

Under Karadzic’s explicit direction, from the nearby mountain village of Pale, Sarajevo was repeatedly shelled and targeted by Serbian snipers. A vibrant, ethnically diverse city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, it became a devastated ruin, a shadow of itself that has only recently begun to recover.

In The Hague, where Karadzic topped the most-wanted list, the tribunal praised the arrest as a milestone in international law.

“This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade,” the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Serge 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.”

Brammertz canceled a trip to Belgrade today, perhaps as a way to allow the Serbian judicial process to act without apparent outside interference. Serbian authorities will now weigh Karadzic’s extradition to The Hague and entertain opposing motions from his attorneys. His removal to the international court could take up to 10 days, but most experts predicted a quicker process.

The war in Bosnia erupted in the spring of 1992 after the republic -- more than 40% Muslim -- declared independence from then-Yugoslavia, as Slovenia and Croatia had done months earlier. Egged on by Serbia, Serbs in Bosnia fought to prevent secession.

After Karadzic, the last prominent fugitive from those wars of the 1990s is former Gen. Ratko Mladic, who served as Karadzic’s military commander. Mladic enjoyed support from the Serbian army, and has often hid in plain sight, mostly in Belgrade.

But Holbrooke said Karadzic was more evil than Mladic because he was the intellectual author and racist enabler of a brutal regime.

Most of the Serbs and Croats who fled Sarajevo under fire never returned, ensuring that more than a decade after the war, Karadzic’s goal of destroying ethnic coexistence at least partially succeeded.

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wilkinson@latimes.com

Times staff writer Wilkinson reported from Rome and special correspondent Cirjakovic from Belgrade.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Radovan Karadzic

* Born: June 19, 1945, in a mountain hamlet in Montenegro. Father was a Serb nationalist fighter.

* Career: Psychiatrist and amateur poet before becoming leader of the new Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia-Herzegovina and later president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb Republic. Resigned under international pressure in July 1996.

* Fugitive: The U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted Karadzic in July 1995 on charges of authorizing the shooting of unarmed Sarajevo civilians and making hostages of U.N. peacekeepers. He was indicted again four months later for allegedly orchestrating the slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys after Serb forces seized the U.N.’s Srebrenica “safe area.”

Karadzic’s arrest leaves two men on the run from the U.N. tribunal:

* Ratko Mladic, 65: Military leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war; twice indicted on genocide charges, for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 people are believed to have died, and for the Srebrenica massacre.

* Goran Hadzic, 49: Croatian Serb local official; indicted on charges of planning the murder and deportations of hundreds of non-Serbs in the self-declared Serb republic of Krajina in Croatia.

Source: Reuters

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The U.N. tribunal’s charges

Under an indictment last amended in May 2000, the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague charged former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic with 15 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities:

* Six counts of genocide and complicity in genocide (in Srebrenica and elsewhere in Bosnia-Herzegovina)

* Two counts of crimes against humanity

* One count of violation of the laws or customs of war

* One count of grave breach of the Geneva Conventions governing wartime conduct

* One count of persecution

* Two counts of deportations and other inhumane acts

* One count of inflicting terror upon civilians

* One count of taking hostages

The indictment says Karadzic and his wartime military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, “are criminally responsible for the unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship.”

Source: Associated Press