Radovan Karadzic, under indictment for war crimes, arrested after 13 years in hiding.
If you ask two of my closest friends what country they come from they will always reply ‘the former Yugoslavia’ and never Bosina. It always starts an interesting conversation.
I met them over ten years ago and have, ever since, been the willing recipient of the most valuable kind of pedagogy, beget not from books or written by some armchair historian or politician but from first hand experience.
I sometimes forget what they’ve been through. Sometimes it’s like they were never there, that the stories told were of two other sisters from a family of Christians Muslims, Bosnians and Serbs that were all ripped apart and who all suffered; they were just the raconteurs.
“He’s hiding in Belgrade, it’s the only way he could get away with it without being caught”. Just last week she again reafirmed her premonition. Now, here we are; the day after. Radovan Karadzic, or ’Dragan Dabic’ as he came to be known as in the Belgrade suburb he made his home, has been arrested following 13 years in hiding. It is fitting that the man said to be responsible for the genocide of 8,000 Bosnians in Srebrenicia is captured only a few days following the commeration of those that died in the massacre. Reports have surfaced that Karadzic eluded the world by using fake documents and growing his hair and beard…whilst trading as a doctor in alternative medicine. Oh the irony.
Read more here about his life a health advisor.
But the pessimist in me feels it’s all a little too good to be true; are we being naive? Surely ‘Dabic’ must have been a well known secret within the small traditional community he was found in? He wasn’t hiding in the Afghan mountain or a hole in the north of Iraq; ‘they’ always knew where he was. And the know where Mladic is too, he’ll be next. Why now? Has the Serbian government given Karadzic up so as gazump Russia, Turkey, Bosnia, Croatia to an EU membership? What deals were made behind closed doors? Does justice prevail because we live in a righteous world and because leaders have a concience or has it become nothing more than a tool used to exploit?
As David Crane, professor at Syracuse University and former U.N. prosecutor who indicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor stated: “It always boils down to politics, the legal aspects may be relatively clear, but turning over senior government officials or a head of state is purely a political decision.”
Questions for a different day perhaps.
The Hauge, and the world, now awaits the trial of Karadzic and the tales that will come with his indictment. Under the last ammendment by the United Nations war crimes tribunal Karadzic will be charged with 15 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes aginst humanity.
Karadzic lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, said Karadzic would fight extradition to the Netherlands – he has three days to appeal the ruling. There have been protests by Serbian nationalists against his arrest.
Under an indictment last amended in May 2000, the United Nations war crimes tribunal charged former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic with 15 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities committed between 1992 to 1996. Here is a summary:
“Thousands of Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilians, including women, children and elderly persons, were detained … for protracted periods of time. They were not afforded judicial process and their internment was not justified by military necessity. They were detained, in large measure, because of their national, religious and political identity. The conditions in the detention facilities were inhumane and brutal …”
“In many instances, women and girls who were detained were raped at the camps or taken from the detention centers and raped or otherwise sexually abused at other locations. Daily food rations provided to detainees were inadequate and often amounted to starvation rations. Medical care for the detainees was insufficient or nonexistent and the general hygienic conditions were grossly inadequate.”
“Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, individually and in concert with others, planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of unlawful attacks against the civilian population and individual civilians with weapons such as mortars, rockets and artillery.”
“Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, individually and in concert with others planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the destruction of sacred sites or knew or had reason to know that subordinates were about to damage or destroy these sites or had done so and failed to take necessary and reasonable measures to prevent them from doing so or to punish the perpetrators thereof.”
“Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, individually and in concert with others planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of the taking of civilians, that is UN peacekeepers, as hostages and, additionally, using them as ‘human shields’.”
Whatever the niggling questions, at least there’ll be some sort of symbolic justice served to all those that suffered when he’s tried on a world stage – unless he dies of a mysterious illness.
But, let us not forget the millions that have witnessed, lived and died through such crimes as listed above and will never see any justice of the kind.
July 25, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Oh Hind, I do love you more than Amy Winehouse loves crack, but you could at least look on the bright side. A democratic, pro Western government has forced the surrender of a very evil man, a few weeks after its election, just as it said it would. the ‘they’ you refer to are two different sets of governmnts. the ‘they’ that gave him up could not have known where he was until they came to power, at which point they acted totally responsibly. One of the few good news stories of the decade, and it should be regarded as such.