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Richard Holbrooke, the accused
Two weeks ago in his initial review by the ICTY prosecution, indicted Bosnian Serb Radovan Karadžić claimed that Richard Holbrooke, former US Envoy to Bosnia and broker of the Dayton Peace Accords, offered Karadžić immunity from arrest if he disappeared from political and public life. Karadžić said he signed a written agreement with Holbrooke in 1996 promising that he would not be sent to the Hague. Disregarded initially as one more wild claim made by an unhinged criminal given to bombastic speech, allegations that Holbrooke and the West protected Karadžić have since been made by more reputable sources.
Charles Ingrao, an history professor at Purdue and member of the Scholars’ Initiative, said in an interview with my editor last week that four sources in the US State Department confirmed Karadžić’s allegations: “A top State Department official with intimate knowledge of Holbrooke’s activities has confirmed that the Ambassador explicitly assured Karadzic that he would not be arrested, a concession known to several others at the State Department who have remained silent” said Ingrao.
Supporting this, Florence Hartmann, a spokeswoman for Carla Del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor for the ICTY, said that the United States, Britain, and France would regularly disrupt attempts to arrest Karadžić when investigators got too close: “Sometimes arrest operations were halted by Chirac personally, or other times by Clinton”, Hartmann told Blic. The third shoe dropped when James Luko, a former UN political affairs officer in Bosnia and Hague investigator, told a Belgrade newspaper that the Angus Ramsey, the former general of British peacekeepers in Bosnia, was ordered by London not to arrest Karadžić just minutes before his troops prepared to capture him in 1997.
The problem was not in Belgrade, it was in the West. Ingrao believes that Karadžić was protected because “It was feared that [his arrest] would destabilize the situation after the Dayton agreements.”
The validity Karadžić’s and former UN officials’s claim may be established in the next years of the Hague’s proceedings, though it is not hard now to imagine that the US would subvert its professed ideals to realpolitik. The important question is how this duplicity will be viewed by those in the Balkans. Most likely another exasperated shake of the head at a resented foreign presence.
Radovan Karadžić arrives at the detention center in the Hague this morning
At 6:30 this morning Radovan Karadžić landed in the Hague. By 7:45 he was in Scheveningen prison. The ICTY now begins the laborious process of preparing, hearing and ruling in the case against the most wanted war criminal of the Bosnian War. Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor, indicted Karadžić for genocide, crimes against humanity, extermination, and persecution among other charges.
At a press conference this afternoon Brammertz said that, although the case carries special importance and the tribunal is “fully aware of the need to be efficient”, Karadžić will probably not appear in trial for a number of months. The prosecution needs to prepare arguments, the court needs to whittle down the mountain of evidence before it, and Karadžić himself needs time to prepare his own defense.
Like Milošević, Karadžić has refused legal counsel and chosen to defend himself. The ICTY, hoping to avoid having Karadžić, like Milošević, turn their courtroom into a soapbox for bombastic nationalist speeches, is considering requiring Karadžić to take legal counsel. The trial will be a second chance for the ICTY, which, one analyst noted, “hopes to address the sense of frustration with and among the tribunal at the failure to sentence Milošević.
Karadžić was extradited to the Hague only nine days after his arrest. His lawyer filed an appeal, which would have delayed the extradition had it not gotten lost in the Bosnian postal system. The deadline for appeal passed this morning, and the ICTY wasted no time in removing Karadžić from Belgrade, where 16,000 protesters have gathered in the past two days. The Serbian Radical Party and the Serbian Democratic Party have organized the rally, bringing in thousands from rural locations where nationalism is extremely popular.
Pro-Karadžić protesters in Belgrade
80 people have been injured in the rally so far, 51 of them police officers. The protesters are calling for the resignation of the pro-European President Boris Tadić, and demanding that Karadžić be tried in Serbia rather than the Hague, calling the international tribunal an element of Western oppression against Serbia. “Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free”, Elena Pavovski, a 24 year old supporter of the Radical Party told The New York Times, “Karadžić is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s”.
After two years of hearings, Bosnia’s national court this afternoon passed its first verdict involving charges of genocide, and its first verdict pertaining to crimes committed during the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Hilmo Vučinić, the presiding judge and only Bosnian national on the three judge panel, ruled that seven members of the Army of the Republika Srpska [VRS] and the Republika Srpska Special Military Police [RSMUP] are guilty of committing the gravest crime punishable under international law: genocide.
In July 1995, Milenko Trifunović, Brane Džinić, Aleksandar Radovanović, Slobodan Jakovljević, Branislav Medan, and Petar Mitrović, as members of the Second Šekovići Police Detachment of the RSMUP commanded by Miloš Stupar, participated in the capture, detention and extermination of over 1,000 Bosniak men and boys escaping the VRS attack on the UN Srebrenica safe area.
On July 12 the Šekovići Detachment was deployed along a road leading from the town of Bratunac to Srebrenica. There, the detachment attacked a column of Bosniaks fleeing Srebrenica, forcing a large number to surrender by shelling and later deception. 1,000 of these captured were taken to a meadow, guarded by the Šekovići Detachment, and on July 13, bused and marched down the road and detained in a warehouse at the Kravica Farming Cooperative.
That evening Trifunović and Radovanović began systematically shooting the prisoners with machine guns while Džinić tossed hand grenades into the warehouse, one after another. The warehouse was divided into two large rooms. After the men killed everyone in the east room, they moved to the west room. Jakovljević, Medan, and Mitrović stood guard at the rear of the warehouse while the 1,000 prisoners were killed. Two people survived the massacre, hiding under the piles of dead bodies. Both served as witnesses in this trial.
The warehouse at the Kravica Farming Cooperative, where 1,000 Bosniaks were killed in July, 1995
Three of the sentenced were given 42 years in prison, two years over the prescribed 40 year sentence for genocide. Vučinić cited aggravating circumstances such as “the particularly cruel and vicious manner” in which the sentenced killed the prisoners, “a behavior that a human mind cannot comprehend”. Stupar was given 40 years for “the crime of omission”. As commander of the Šekovići Detachment, Stupar was “the point of contact between high command and the forces on the ground” and thus was fully aware of not only the order to kill the 1,000 Bosnian prisoners but also of its place in Karadžić and Mladić’s plan to “permanently expunge” Bosnian Muslims from Srebrenica. Jakovljević and Medan were given 40 years, while Petar Mitrović was given 38, his psychological disorders (most likely PTSD) after the war suggesting to the court that “he suffered some kind of remorse for his acts”.
To convict someone of genocide, the prosecution must prove mens rea, the intent to commit genocide. This, the proof that common police and soldiers had the motive to commit genocide and were not simply following orders or acting out of passion, was probably the largest challenge facing the prosecution. The verdict indicated intent on two levels. Vučinić ruled that “the context of the conflict around Srebrenica was indisputable”. Genocidal intent is, or should be, clear to anyone involved in systematic military actions taken against a civilian population of a specific ethnic group. Furthermore, Vučinić said, the exhumation and reburial of bodies and the washing and obscuring of execution sites suggested that those involved in actions around Srebrenica were aware of the criminality of their actions. The second, specific mens rea of the seven sentenced men was pronounced decisively by the verdict: “the exceptional perseverance demonstrated in the commission of crimes of such a massive scale” required “knowledge of their participation in the permanent expunging of Bosniaks from Srebrenica”.
In the gallery of the courtroom, observers were carefully segregated during the reading of the verdict. Relations of the accused sat on the left side of the aisle, while press, the Mothers of Srebrenica, the OSCE, and other visitors sat on the right. Both sides would look down the rows at each other during the reading. As the sentences were read gasps and cries went up from our left. After the verdict was read we filed out. The relations to the accused stood silently in the lobby outside the courtroom while the Mothers of Srebrenica went in outside of the court to be interviewed by waiting TV crews.
Eight days after the architect of the Srebrenica massacre was arrested, seven of its perpetrators are given the maximum sentence for their crime in a landmark ruling. Good week for what many call a failed system.
A protestor at a rally against Kosovo's declaration of independence holds up a picture of Radovan Karadžić, February 2008
One day after the announcement of Radovan Karadžić’s arrest, posters appeared in the northeastern Bosnian town of Zvornik bearing messages of support for the former ICTY fugitive. They read “Karadžić: Our Serbian hero”, “We won’t let them catch you”, and, perhaps aping Le Monde’s “We are all Americans” of Sept. 13, 2001: “We are all Karadžić”.
On the same day the Serbian Radical Party announced on its website that there would be daily protests in Belgrade against Karadžić’s extradition to the Hague. The protests so far have not been large, with little more than 300 people gathering in the rain in Trg Republika. However, they have been violent and ultra-nationalistic (protesters at one point gathered outside the Turkish embassy. Turkey is a country that has nothing to do with the Karadžić arrest, but the majority of whose citizens share the same religion as Karadžić’s victims).
While the posters and the protests may be little more than the feeble backlash that should be expected when such a symbolic figure falls, what are more unsettling are the tepid reactions in the region, particularly in Serbia. Karadžić’s arrest is seen by some as another act of “punishment” against the Serbs for the wars of the 90s. “Only Serbs are being prosecuted and that’s not right”, Milica Milivojevic from Belgrade told the BBC, “If Karadžić is being sent to The Hague, then others from all sides of the conflict should too”. Even those elated with Karadžić’s arrest seem lukewarm about his extradition, and are cynical about the authorities who took 12 years to find him.
If Karadžić the wartime leader of the RS crafted and employed the myths of ethnic nationalism (still alive and well today), then Karadžić the Hague prisoner has become the myth of justice as a restrained victor’s revenge. Whether or not the cynicism and mistrust is undue (Karadžić did, after all, live in plain sight of NATO troops for several years with an INTERPOL warrant on his head, and the ICTY has a history of being made a farce of by its big fish), the new Karadžić myth moves the region no closer to reconciliation, and no further from the divisions which accelerated it into brutal war. Karadžić the scapegoat serves totalitarian nationalism just as well as Karadžić the president.
Radovan Karadžić’s website can be viewed here, along with his phone number and email address. A phony website was set up here: The irony is thick. Karadžić’s email address is healingwounds@dragandabic.com. From “his” favorite proverbs: “A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion”, “He who gives up his own should dig two graves”.
Hiding in plain sight? It really takes a lot to elude the forces of international justice.
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….”
