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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.
