iR2P

As the International Criminal Court reviews its Chief Prosecutor’s request for an arrest warrant against Sudanese President al-Bashir, another genocide suspect was finally arrested this week - in Serbia.

Radovan Karadžic - a former poet, psychiatrist, politician, ally of Slobodan Miloševic and (from December 1992) Supreme Commander of the Serbian armed forces - is charged with six counts of genocide and complicity in genocide, including the mass execution of over 7,800 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, in which victims were targeted solely on the basis of their identity. (Many bodies were subsequently removed from mass grave sites and reburied by the Serb army in a cover up operation. In 2004, a UN-instigated Serb commission identified 7,800 victims and acknowledged that their capture and mass murder had been planned.) Karadžic is also accused of ordering the shooting of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, in which some 12,000 civilians died.

After years in hiding, Karadžic is in the hands of the Serbian authorities and, following a Serbian court ruling to approve his extradition, must now be transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

A BBC correspondent linked the arrest to last month’s formation of a new, pro-European government in Belgrade, followed by the appointment of a new Serbian intelligence chief.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt spoke for many when he said, “This is late, late, late, but good, good, good.”

Ratko Mladic, the military commander under Karadzic’s command, and Goran Hadzic, accused of war crimes against Croats in the city of Vukovar, are still at large.

[link to BBC video report]