Lj. Stefanovic of the Belgrade weekly Vreme looks at the possible fate of Radovan Karadzic after recent political events in the region in the June 7, 1997 issue of that magazine.
Madeleine Albright came and left, and not a single hair is missing from
Radovan Karadzic's head. In short, that is the report from that part of the Dayton front which the local human rights champions are closely monitoring (by logic, as long as Karadzic is close to The Hague, Milosevic can't be too far from The Hague tribunal either).
As any child in Yugoslavia knows, Madeleine Albright gets most of the credit for the establishment of The Hague tribunal by the United Nations
for war crimes committed during the war in former Yugoslavia. At the time she had laid down all her authority as the US Ambassador to the UN to procure The Hague tribunal with rather large financial means. Today, in the role of State Secretary, she doesn't even try to hide her incredible annoyance with Dayton`s current interpretation by which NATO soldiers are only allowed to arrest the suspect war criminals when and if the latter accidentally find themselves in their way while they are conducting their regular military operations. She is one of the authors of the thesis that Radovan Karadzic's freedom of movement presents the main obstacle in the implementation of the Dayton agreement. Some can't stop wondering how she still hasn't managed to put him behind bars yet.
Last Saturday in Belgrade, Madeleine Albright was markedly reserved on this issue, although her contained fury carries more warning chills than someone else's loud threats (``we are looking into a few options,'' ``we are in favor of a more aggressive support to the Tribunal,'' was all she was willing to say following CNN's Christiane Amanpour's repeated questions). She was somewhat more explicit in Brcko (``criminals will have to pay, and until they start paying for their crimes, those who are protecting them shall have to pay''); however, no amount of rhetoric can hide the fact that the NATO pact, as far as anyone knows, has not issued any new instructions to their troops in Bosnia regarding the arrest of suspected war criminals, even after the meeting in Portugal. However, for the last two months, Mrs. Albright has been regarded with far more seriousness in Pale than before. Radovan Karadzic's armed bodyguards have become far more serious and more numerous, since he is The Hague's main suspect who until recently had carelessly strolled throughout Pale as though strolling in his own back yard while NATO soldiers dutifully turned their heads. Karadzic is now acting like an American crime movie hero. VREME's Pale sources claim that for the past few weeks he hasn't slept in the same house two nights in a row, that he is hiding behind four circles of heavily armed troops and that he is surrounded with mines. Naturally, that doesn`t mean that he couldn't be taken if NATO were to give the green light. However, it's similar to when you protect your house or car from thieves---the thief can still break in, yet he will calculate beforehand whether the risk and effort are worth it. NATO shies away from possible human casualties in the action of capturing Radovan Karadzic, not because the American public couldn't stand the fact that their soldiers are being killed in Bosnia, but because that action would greatly increase the level of danger for all of the American soldiers in
Bosnia, whether they had taken part in the arrest or not. In the meantime, Radovan Karadzic has broken his oath of silence given to Richard Holbrooke, and when he spoke, he spoke in some ten sequences in Belgrade's Vecernje Novosti daily. Pale authorities claim that he did not break his agreement with Holbrooke, as that agreement had a strict deadline (until last year's parliamentary elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Apparently Karadzic will no longer stand the slander and the lies and has decided to answer those who are falsely accusing him,
which probably means that he will never stop talking.
Otherwise, rumors in the Belgrade press that Karadzic is preparing to go to The Hague of his own free will were normal stupidity. The only truth, as VREME's sources claim, is that Radovan Karadzic had dispatched documents to The Hague last year which, as he believes, clearly show that all of his written commands demanded that his subordinates, in both the military and state administration, act towards the POW`s and civilians in keeping with international regulations and conventions. As things now stand, the international community will continue to apply pressure on the Dayton participants to deliver their suspected criminals themselves. That worked in Croatia a short while ago (Zlatko Aleksovski has been ``exchanged'' for almost one hundred million dollars of IMF
aid), to the great joy (and boasting) of American spokesmen. However, Dario Kordic has a much higher price, while Slobodan Milosevic is still acting as though Mladic and Sljivancanin don't have a price.
Otherwise, occasional rumors are leaking from The Hague that even the
Dayton guarantor himself, Slobodan Milosevic, is not immune to criminal charges. That is how the interest of the international public (and financiers) is maintained for the tribunal`s operation which had thus far spent millions of dollars on Dusko Tadic. Rumors also occasionally leak out that certain lower---ranking protagonists of the Bosnian war are secretly being offered immunity from criminal charges in case they consent to volunteer and cooperate in investigating crimes of the larger fish. These tactics employed by The Hague have still not produced significant results, neither public nor secret ones. The Montenegrin prosecutor has been shown Slobodan Milosevic's file at The Hague tribunal, which will most probably encourage Susovic's political mentor in Podgorica.
Source: Belgrade weekly Vreme, June 7, 1997
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