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A twelve year manhunt for the architect of the Srebrenica genocide ended last night as Serbian authorities announced the arrest of Radovan Karadžić. Indicted in 1996 by the ICTY for multiple counts of crimes against humanity, extermination, and genocide, Karadžić was the wartime President of the break-away Bosnian Serb territory of Republika Srpska. As a politician he incited ethnic nationalism and coordinated it into a brutal political and military force. As Supreme Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) he directly ordered and oversaw the Bosnian Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing, commanding Ratko Mladić, the chief of staff of the VRS and now the most wanted man by the ICTY.
“Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milošević, Karadžić and Mladić,” said Richard Holbrooke told The New York Times, “I thought Karadžić was the worst. The reason was that Karadžić was a real racist believer. Karadžić really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milošević was an opportunist”.
Serb authorities said they had been watching Karadžić for a week after a tip-off from a foreign intelligence service. But Karadžić’s lawyer says that Karadžić was arrested on a city bus in Belgrade last Friday night, and was held incommunicado and unannounced by Serb authorities until Monday night.
Beginning last night Bosnian television has been replaying footage of Srebrenica and clips of Karadžić and Mladić shaking hands and inspecting Serb lines around Sarajevo. Headlines this morning read: “Karadžić Arrested: Sarajevo Celebrates, Banja Luka Shocked, Belgrade on the Verge of Incident”. The arrest was hailed by the chief prosecutor of the ICTY as “a milestone for coöperation, a milestone for international justice”, though Bosnians I’ve spoken to here retain their cynicism about the West and the hunt for war criminals.
Nonetheless, with the arrest and trial of one of the most violently nationalistic voices of the war (Karadžić’s speech in the Assembly of BiH in 1991 is considered to have been a principal precipitant in BiH’s disintegration), perhaps Bosnia’s deadlocked political dialogue will move beyond the tired and failed nationalism of the 90s. Read Aleksander Hemon’s article about the Karadžić myth, the actual man, and what his arrest promises:
“…Karadzic in the The Hague is a remedy to the Serbian nationalist mythology–Scheveningen is not a mythological space, but a prison. There, Karadzic would be in the limelight that would dispel the darkness of the nationalist mythology. He would be at the centre of a legal process, a trial based on documents and testimonies, which would demythologize his actions, and dismantle his criminal universe….”
Mourners at Srebrenica
On Friday, July 11th, I traveled with two colleagues from BIRN to the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. We joined 40,000 other people, among them local and national politicians, American and European diplomats, and religious dignitaries, at a large field outside the town to bury the remains of the 307 Bosniak men and boys found over the last year in mass graves in the eastern Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska (RS). The 307 new tabuti were to join 3,200 others already in the ground at Potočari memorial center, the final resting place of victims of the worst act of genocide in Europe since WWII.
Srebrenica has become symbolic not only of the gross brutality of the Bosnian war, but also of the dear price of the international community’s blundering inability to guarantee the basic humanitarian tenets of their mission. By late June, 1995 over 50,000 Bosniak refugees had gathered in the UN administered town of Srebrenica, surrounded on all sides by the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) carrying out their campaign of ethnic cleansing. Noting the rapid advance of the VRS towards Srebrenica, the UN quickly declared the town a “safe area”, the first to be created in UN history, and dispatched 400 DUTCHBAT troops to protect the town. A combination of incomplete orders from above, lopsided numbers, and simple confusion rendered the safe area a farce. Out from under the UN’s nose, the VRS in broad daylight separated the men and boys of military age from the refugees, bused them to locations outside of town and shot them to death. Seeing what was happening, the remaining refugees formed a column to march through the surrounding VRS territory to the Bosnian held city of Tuzla, 55 kilometers away. On this “Road to Salvation” the refugees were attacked by the VRS, the column broke apart and a terrifying manhunt began for the disbanded and disoriented Bosniaks. Some made it to Tuzla; many were killed by the VRS.
Thirteen years later, it is estimated that over 8,000 Bosniak civilians from the Srebrenica safe area were killed between July 11th and 22nd, 1995. Each year, new bodies are exhumed and buried on July 11th across the road from the DUTCHBAT headquarters in the Potočari memorial center.
A journalist photographs the names of victims
It is a massive ceremony, attended by every major diplomat and politician, except those from the Republika Srpska. This entity of the Bosnia and Herzegovinan state, ethnically Serb since the war and the district in which Srebrenica lies, only formally recognized the genocide of Srebrenica in 2004. On the road through the RS from Sarajevo to Srebrenica, Serbian flags flew in towns, the Latin names on road signs were covered with spray-paint, leaving only the Cyrillic names (Serbia uses a Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatia and BiH use a Latin one), and the sign welcoming motorists to the town of Vlasenica was graffitied to read “Welcome to Serbian Vlasenica”. In the evening we drove to the town of Bratunac, five minutes down the road from Potočari. Bratunac is an ethnically Serb town, and not a single resident went to the funeral at Potočari that day. My colleagues interviewed two young Bosnian Serbs at the Omladinski Centar, a youth center in Bratunac down the street from an elementary school where over 100 Bosniaks were held and shot by the VRS during the massacre. The two young men said they would have liked to go to Potočari, but feared reprisals from their neighbors.
As we drove back to Sarajevo that night we passed people waving Serbian flags, holding out the three fingered nationalist salute, and burning fires to celebrate St. Petra, the patron saint of Serbia. The bizarre mix of symbolism, both that afternoon at Potočari where the Bosnian flag (a neutral symbol crafted by the international community to only slightly resemble the historical flag of Bosnia) waved over NATO troops, Japanese diplomats, imams, orthodox priests, and the Women in Black (an NGO with a chapter in Belgrade advocating solidarity and reconciliation), and what we saw later along the road through the RS underscored the ambivalent nature of the largest open wound in post-war BiH. As we passed through Vlasenica, a sign read a proverb from the region: “It is hard for god, when we are like this”.
Mourners pass tabuti towards open graves
The experience at Srebrenica is, I believe, representative of a large part of the post-war situation in BiH. Many ordinary citizens have ambiguous feelings towards the events of the war, but the national discourse lies locked in an impasse, unable to find a way out through its own localized ideas of the nation, nostalgia for the brotherhood of Yugoslavia, and the internationalism imported from the West after the war.
A separate piece about the trip I wrote for BIRN can be read here.
The first piece I wrote for BIRN was on the ‘Algerian Six’, or the ‘Algerian Group’ as they are known in Bosnia. The six men moved to Bosnia during the early 90s to fight in the conflict or work for Islamic aid organizations deployed to the region. After the Dayton Peace Accords, all six men settled in Bosnia, four marrying Bosnian women and all having permission from the BiH government to remain in the country.
In 2002, US officials in the region suspected the six men (who had not known each other until arrested and detained together) of plotting to bomb US and British embassies in Sarajevo. The Supreme Court of Bosnia conducted an investigation, finding all six men innocent of the charges. Promptly thereafter, the Bosnian Court of Human Rights issued an order that the men not be illegally deported from Bosnia.
The men were released in the middle of the night following the two court orders. They were led by Bosnian prison guards to the central courtyard of the Sarajevo Central Jail and handed over to a mixed force of Bosnian and US forces. The six men were then immediately flown to Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, where they became some of the first detainees to be sent there during America’s War on Terror.
In the US, the case of the Algerian Six made big waves recently. The Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush (a case brought forward on behalf of the six Bosnians), decided that Combatant Status Review Tribunals are not adequate procedures to provide the writ of habeas corpus. This is a major step in resolving questions about the legality of the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay, one that is notably made in the direction of closing the base.
In contrast to this major development in the US, in Bosnia the case of the Algerian Six has made little progress. The BiH government acted illegally by handing over its citizens to the United States against two court orders. Currently, a suit against the BiH government is being made on behalf of the families of the six men at the European Court of Human Rights. The same wonderful lawyers at Wilmer-Hale who took the Bosnians’ case to the US Supreme Court are working in Strasbourg pro bono.
Nonetheless, the damage has been done. The government of BiH seriously wounded the integrity of its Supreme Court and its Court of Human Rights, both cherished elements of the post-war institutions set up by Europe and the US. But beyond this, it has again demonstrated to its citizens that law and human rights are secondary to the politically opportune.
