Bosnia war crime suspect Karadzic arrested-BREAKING NEWS

[DarthShady]

Link

BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) -- Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a top war crimes suspect, was arrested Monday in Serbia, the Serbian president and the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said.
Radovan Karadzic in 1995.

Radovan Karadzic in 1995.

President Boris Tadic's office said in a statement that Karadzic was arrested on Monday evening "in an action by the Serbian security services."

Karadzic was indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian war and had been hiding since 1998.

Serbia has been under heavy pressure from the European Union to turn over suspects to the international tribunal.

If Karadzic is extradited, he would be the 44th Serb suspect extradited to the tribunal. The others include former President Slobodan Milosevic, who was ousted in 2000 and died in 2006 while on trial on war crimes charges.

Karadzic was wanted on genocide charges for allegedly organizing the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and other atrocities of the Bosnian war.

"I was informed by our colleagues in Belgrade about the successful operation which resulted in the arrest of Radovan Karadzic," the tribunal's head prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, said

"On behalf of the Office of the Prosecutor, I would like to congratulate the Serbian authorities, especially the National Security Council, Serbia's Action Team in charge of tracking fugitives and the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor, on achieving this milestone in cooperation with the ICTY."

He added: "This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade. 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."

Karadzic was a fugitive from justice for almost 13 years. The first indictment against him was confirmed on 24 July 1995.

Karadzic, the former President of the Serb Republic, head of the Serbian Democratic Party and Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, is charged with genocide, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, wilful killing, persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, and other crimes committed against Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war.

His indictment alleges that he, acting together with others, committed the crimes to secure control of areas of Bosnia which had been proclaimed part of the "Serbian Republic" and significantly reducing its non-Serb population.

On Saturday, Serb authorities turned over an ex-Bosnian Serb police chief, Stojan Zupljanin, who was arrested in the town of Pancevo last week after nine years on the run. A Belgrade court on Friday rejected his appeal against extradition and Zupljanin pleaded innocent Monday to 12 charges of murder, torture and persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992.

Zupljanin was charged with war crimes for allegedly overseeing Serb-run prison camps where thousands of Muslims and Croats were killed during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.

They finally got the bastard. It has been too long.

[Pelranius]

Whaddya know? Hell does freeze over .

[DarthShady]

It had to happen. Lets just hope this one survives the trial.

I love Dodik's reaction, he seems so confused.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

What are the odds he will get charged? Or the Serbian nationalists go out crying?

[CaptainChewbacca]

Isn't this the guy who coined the phrase 'Ethnic Cleansing'?!

[DarthShady]

What are the odds he will get charged? Or the Serbian nationalists go out crying?

He will get charged and they can cry all they want. And you can be sure they will protest and bitch about it.

Isn't this the guy who coined the phrase 'Ethnic Cleansing'?!

Pretty much, yes.

[weemadando]

It's about time. Now lets hope that this fucker doesn't commit suicide while in custody.

[Siege]

10 years late but better late than never! Though since Karadzic is already 63 years of age by the time he's convicted he probably won't do much jailtime anymore...

[Netko]

What to say except - fuck yeah. I honestly lost hope that this would happen, what with Serbia and RS being on a permanent brink of sliding into radicalism.

Seems Tadić and company found their balls finally. Its also indicative how fast he was arrested once a government that wanted to arrest him was put in place - really indicative...

On the prosecution front, I was kinda hoping they would not use the everything and the kitchen sink approach, seeing what a debacle it caused with Milošević - it would be much better to simply nail him quickly and efficiently to the wall on Srebrenica, which is already recognized as a genocide done by Bosnian Serbian forces and lock him up and throw away the key. He IS an old man after all, and the sentence on genocide surely can't be very low. But it seems they are going with the kitchen sink approach (does it really matter that much, in general, and not to the US and Western Europe, considering everything he's responsible for, that he used UN observers as human shields?) - I fervently hope that we don't get another "Milošević outcome".

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

What to say except - fuck yeah. I honestly lost hope that this would happen, what with Serbia and RS being on a permanent brink of sliding into radicalism.

Seems Tadić and company found their balls finally. Its also indicative how fast he was arrested once a government that wanted to arrest him was put in place - really indicative...

On the prosecution front, I was kinda hoping they would not use the everything and the kitchen sink approach, seeing what a debacle it caused with Milošević - it would be much better to simply nail him quickly and efficiently to the wall on Srebrenica, which is already recognized as a genocide done by Bosnian Serbian forces and lock him up and throw away the key. He IS an old man after all, and the sentence on genocide surely can't be very low. But it seems they are going with the kitchen sink approach (does it really matter that much, in general, and not to the US and Western Europe, considering everything he's responsible for, that he used UN observers as human shields?) - I fervently hope that we don't get another "Milošević outcome".

I forgot what happened with Milosevic, though I recall it turned into one hell of a soap opera that tainted quite a few in court as well. What happened really?

[DarthShady]

You can read about it here.

It was a mess.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

You can read about it here.

It was a mess.

Oh yes, he ... died.

But the trial was hardly smooth going, wasn't it?

[Netko]

He died in prison (there is some controversy if it was an intentional suicide by not taking proper medication) before the trial could finish, but after the prosecution had finished laying out its case, and the defense had only a small part still left to present. Most observers believed that he would have been found guilty on most or all of the charges. The trial lasted 4 years, mostly because the prosecution went with the kitchen sink approach and charged him with all of his crimes rather then focusing on the big, easily provable, ones. During the trial, his health constantly deteriorated, and there were many calls, including inside the prosecution team, to drop the complex, hard to prove charges so that a conviction could be secured in a reasonable time frame.

Beyond just him, a conviction would have put it as fact in international law that Serbia and Serb puppets committed aggression and other war crimes (including genocide in Srebrenica) in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo - which would have had broader implications, at the very least with the cases of Bosnia and Croatia against Serbia for war reparations.

[Netko]

As for the mess part... well, Milošević did his best to turn the trial into a mockery (not recognizing the ICTY's jurisdiction, defending himself, etc.) and as a soapbox for raising the question of NATO war crimes responsibility for potential crimes during the '99 bombing campaign. That, obviously, had an effect on the trial, and caused it to sometimes have a bit of a surreal atmosphere. The bickering in the prosecution team didn't help.

[Pelranius]

That clown Ramsey Clark was also one of his attorneys, though that was probably more as a publicity stunt than anything else. I always wondered how that loonie ever made Attorney General anyways.

[DarthShady]

I was short on time so I took the lazy man's approach and posted a link. Sorry Fingolfin.

Netko explained it quite nicely.

I really hope the prosecution does the smart thing this time.

[[R_H]]

Karadzic 'worked in Serb clinic' - BBC

Captured war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic was living in Serbia's capital Belgrade and practising alternative medicine, Serb officials say.

He was sporting a long white beard and calling himself Dragan Dabic, said Serbian minister Rasim Ljajic.

The former Bosnian Serb leader was arrested on Monday near Belgrade after more than a decade on the run.

He has been indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide relating to the war in Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

The UN says Mr Karadzic's forces killed up to 8,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995 as part of a campaign to "terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population".

He was also charged over the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.

A judge has ordered Mr Karadzic's transfer to the UN war crimes court in The Hague, Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said.

Mr Karadzic's lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, has said he will appeal against the ruling; he has three days to do so.

Mr Ljajic, the Serbian minister for relations with The Hague tribunal, said Mr Karadzic had lived in a "very convincing" way as a non-Serbian citizen, using false papers.

"The fact that he was involved with alternative medicine, earning his money from practising alternative medicine, shows that he worked. He was working in a private practice and the last place where he had residence was New Belgrade," he told a news conference in Belgrade.

Mr Vukcevic said: "[Mr Karadzic] walked around freely, even appeared in public places. The people who rented him the apartment did not know his true identity."

He even gave public lectures and was a regular contributor to Healthy Life magazine, editor Goran Kojic was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

"It never even occurred to me that this man with a long white beard and hair was Karadzic," Mr Kojic said.

Serbian intelligence officers were on the trail of Mr Karadzic's wartime military leader, Ratko Mladic, when they stumbled upon Mr Karadzic, said the office of Serbia's war crimes prosecutor.

Agents waited for the right moment when Mr Karadzic was alone and could be arrested without putting members of the public at risk, they said, and that moment came on a bus in a Belgrade suburb on Monday evening.

Mr Karadzic had last been seen in public in eastern Bosnia in 1996, and was previously thought to have hidden in Serb controlled parts of Bosnia, as well as in Montenegro and Serbia.

The arrest of Mr Karadzic and other indicted war criminals is one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards European Union membership.

A new European-leaning government took office in Serbia about two weeks ago.

Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said Mr Karadzic's capture demonstrated the government's political commitment to eventual EU membership.

After meeting Mr Jeremic in Brussels, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said the arrest moved Serbia closer to EU candidate status.

Mr Karadzic has denied the charges against him and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the UN tribunal.

After the accord that ended the Bosnian war was signed in late 1995 in Dayton, in the US state of Ohio, the former nationalist president went into hiding.

International pressure to catch Mr Karadzic mounted in spring 2005 when several of his former generals surrendered, and a video of Bosnian Serb soldiers shooting captives from Srebrenica shocked television viewers in former Yugoslavia.

He was a close ally of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was himself extradited to The Hague tribunal in 2001, but died in 2006, shortly before a verdict was due to be delivered in his case.

[Pelranius]

He should also put charged for practicing that alternative medicine crap and for the awful hairstyle he used to sport.

Belgrade, I would have expected him to by closer to the Bosnian border.

[weemadando]

For a moment I thought they'd arrested James Randi by mistake.

I'm glad to see now that the various ethnic groups are now trying to kill each other in the streets again over whether the arrest/charges are justified. It's wonderful to know that some things just don't change.

[Phil Skayhan]

For a moment I thought they'd arrested James Randi by mistake.

I'm glad to see now that the various ethnic groups are now trying to kill each other in the streets again over whether the arrest/charges are justified. It's wonderful to know that some things just don't change.

This was in Beograd not the multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo so the only people involved in this event were Serbs.

So there was a demonstration and a clash with police with some injuries, but unless you have a source I don't there were no deaths. The demonstration wasn't even that large and consisted of around 200 members of a nationalistic movement party called "Obraz".

SerbianCafe with video

There is a small explosion toward the end of the vid but the article makes no mention of it. And it looks like the police had it under control.

[DarthShady]

For a moment I thought they'd arrested James Randi by mistake.

I'm glad to see now that the various ethnic groups are now trying to kill each other in the streets again over whether the arrest/charges are justified. It's wonderful to know that some things just don't change.

This is just the nationalist assholes in Serbia. There haven't been any problems in Sarajevo. The people are happy that the bastard has been caught.

[[R_H]]

Interesting

Karadzic 'aims to defend himself'

War crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic plans to conduct his own defence in his trial at The Hague, his lawyer says.

"Karadzic will have a legal team in Serbia that will help him with his defence but he will defend himself," said lawyer Sveta Vujacic.

Mr Karadzic would be following former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who defended himself during his long-running trial at The Hague tribunal.

Mr Karadzic was captured on Monday after more than a decade in hiding.

He is being held in Belgrade pending his extradition to the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Dutch city.

His lawyer says he will appeal against the extradition, but not until just before the deadline to do so, on Friday.

"He has asked for a haircut and a shave," Mr Vujacic told Reuters news agency. "Today I expect to see him with his hair short and no beard."

Mr Karadzic, 63, declared independence for Bosnian Serbs in 1991, sparking the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. He has been indicted for crimes against humanity and genocide over the massacre of up to 8,000 mainly-Muslim Bosniaks at Srebrenica in 1995.

He went into hiding in the years after the war, but was discovered to be posing as a doctor of alternative medicine in Belgrade.

He was arrested on a bus in a suburb of Serbia's capital on Monday.

Serbia has been urged to follow up the arrest of Mr Karadzic by quickly catching his wartime commander, Ratko Mladic.

The US envoy at the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, said the US rejoiced at Mr Karadzic's arrest and hoped Gen Mladic would soon meet a similar fate.

France said the European Union expected further arrests.

Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic told the BBC that Mr Karadzic's arrest showed his country was firmly committed to EU membership.

The arrest of Mr Karadzic and other indicted war criminals is one of the main conditions of Serbian progress towards joining the EU.

A new European-leaning government took office in Serbia earlier this month.

Life on the run

More details have emerged of Mr Karadzic's life on the run practising alternative medicine under the name of Dragan Dabic.

Masquerading as an expert in human quantum energy, the fugitive was so confident in his disguise he even had his own website, and would give out business cards during alternative medicine lectures.

His card gave his name as D D David, D D apparently standing for his pseudonym Dragan Dabic.

Billed as Dabic, Spiritual Explorer, Mr Karadzic gave lectures comparing meditation and silent techniques practised by Orthodox monks. He spoke in Belgrade in May, and also in the town of Smederevo, east of the capital.

The BBC's Nick Thorpe in Belgrade says the city is alive with speculation that the last two men on the tribunal's wanted list - Gen Mladic, and Goran Hadzic, a former Serb politician wanted for "ethnic cleansing" in Croatia - could be arrested next.

Serbian intelligence officers were on the trail of Gen Mladic when they stumbled upon Mr Karadzic, said the office of Serbia's war crimes prosecutor.

But Gen Mladic has strong links with the Serb army and might put up more resistance than Mr Karadzic, our correspondent says.

The Charge d'Affaires at the Serbian embassy in Washington, Vladimir Petrovic, told the BBC Mr Karadzic's arrest showed Serbia was "fully committed to international law and its international obligations".

"Serbia also is fully committed to joining the EU, and I think this is an example of a modern, European Serbia," he added.

The EU Enlargement Commissioner, Olli Rehn, said the arrest had moved Serbia closer to EU candidate status and should pave the way for closer trade ties.

Three criteria

Mr Karadzic was questioned by a Serbian judge on Tuesday, who ruled that he should be extradited.

Under Serbia's law on co-operation with war crimes tribunal, three hurdles must be crossed before Mr Karadzic is sent to The Hague.

A magistrate must conclude that all conditions for extradition have been met. Mr Karadzic must be granted a chance to appeal and a special committee of the war crimes court must rule on that appeal. The whole process could take anything from three to nine days.

The UN says the Srebrenica massacre was part of a campaign to "terrorise and demoralise the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat population".

He has also been charged over the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.

Mr Karadzic has denied the charges and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the UN tribunal.

He was a close ally of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who was himself extradited to The Hague tribunal in 2001, but died in 2006, shortly before a verdict was due to be delivered.