Wednesday, 07.23.08
Capturing Karadzic
Michael Evstafiev/AFP/Getty Images
The Reluctant Gendarme
April 2000
Chuck Sudetic investigates why France is protecting indicted war criminals in Bosnia.
Europe's Third World
July 1989
International criminal courts are on a roll. Last week, the Hague's prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo requested the arrest of Sudan's president Hassan Ahmad al Bashir for genocide, human rights violations and war crimes. Now the International Criminal Court of the former Yugoslavia expects that Serbia will soon hand over Radovan Karadzic, the ultranationalist wanted for genocide during the Bosnian civil war, after his arrest on Monday. The thinned down, whimsically bearded Karadzic -- a trained psychiatrist, poet, and writer before rising to power, who authorized the sniping of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica -- had been living as, of all things, a practitioner of alternative medicine. It was a brilliantly counter-intuitive disguise worthy of Ian Fleming or Peter Sellers. But though he had a massive support network allowing him to hide in plain sight, the political climate inside Serbia has evolved: Handing over Karadzic, and eventually his ally, Gen. Ratko Mladic, also wanted for genocide, is a critical precondition to joining the European Union, which the Serbian government ardently desires. These kinds of democratic sea changes are precisely what international human rights lawyers in the Hague bet on when they bring seemingly toothless arrest warrants or indictments against war criminals who appear untouchable, like, for now, Sudan's Al Bashir.
Arresting war criminals requires a great deal of patience, not least because each arrest builds on precedent established by the last. American University's Robert K. Goldman, co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, and former president of the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, says he's seen this long-term approach pay off in Latin America, where criminal heads of state and their generals are being brought to justice as governments evolve democratically.
"When the law breaking regime's period is over and a new regime gets in one of the things the new regime will seek to do is to begin complying with human rights law. And we've seen this over and over in Latin America," says Goldman, who was also led prosecutions during the 1990s against South American states that massacred its citizens or tortured suspected terrorists to fight its dirty wars. Goldman adds that it's something of a popularity contest between states that has had the effect of cutting off escape avenues for former dictators.
While a government committing genocide might ridicule and reject human rights rulings brought by the commission's parallel Inter-American Human Rights Court, the next government, Goldman told me, often wants to fulfill IAHRC judgments to join the democratic community by nullifying internal or intra-state amnesties meant to protect war criminals, as occurred in Argentina, Chile, and Peru. This approach has begun to whittle away the number of possible hiding places for exiled leaders. The ICC and the IAHRC would love to get their hands on a war criminal sooner rather the later, but success in Latin America, or anywhere else, is not a matter immediate results, says Goldman.
Democratization in Serbia has been working against Karadzic and Mladic for a long time, and the former Serbian leaders had obviously not been forgotten by the ICC. Certainly, Al Bashir, still waiting indictment, should remember that fact and perhaps reconsider his course in Sudan. By example, it's not impossible that Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe, who has been the architect of much violence in his country, may have factored the Hague's long game with Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor, much less Karadzic and Mladic, into his reasoning for agreeing to power sharing talks with opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Granted, after 300,000 dead in Sudan, ending the violence in its Darfur region may not help Al Bashir if he finds himself in a docket at the Hague, but it certainly couldn't hurt the accused genocidier should a democratic flood arrive unexpectedly in Sudan as it did in Serbia.
Update: An earlier version of this post erroneously stated that Bosnian Serbs, rather than Bosnian Muslims, were massacred at Srebrenica. In addition, Karadzic will be handed over to the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, not the ICC itself.
A sense of urgencyDejan Anastasijevic, a Belgrade journalist, argues that the worst war criminals should be pursued thoroughly and swiftly. |
Where's Karadzic?A blog devoted to Karadzic's capture. |
Karadzic's himselfBBC News offers a glimpse into the life of Radovan Karadzic. |
Better chancesThe Economist explains how Karadzic's arrest boosts Serbia's prospects of joining the European Union. |
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Glad they finally got him.
I do believe it's not the ICC to which he's being handed over but the ICTY -- the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia -- which is a separate institution.
Usual spaghetti of blah blah reporting. Everything piled up - ICC, democratization, Sudan, Serbia, Latin America. Check out http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=673 for the balanced view of Karadzic arrest.
First to point out two major and unforgivable mistakes in this article: a. it is not ICC, but ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) which will try Karadzic; b. over 8.000 Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and not Serbs were massacred at Srebrenica.
As for the rest of the article, "counterintuitive" or not, only the naive or uninformed may believe that Karadzic was living in Belgrade without the knowledge and perhaps aid of Serbian secret services (Security and Information Agency, formerly known as State Security Branch). In the same vein, arresting war criminals is a matter of politics or more precisely political will which in Serbian case has been absent for decades now. And as always, when they did arrest him they did not do so in order to help the country and the society face the crimes comitted in their name, but in order to be able to finally ratify Stabilization and Association Agreement with EU.
And finally, I am a regular Atlantic reader and am amazed to find such unacceptably amateurish reporting on your web-site.
The arrest of Karadzic is a good news for the little humanity left in the world. But let's not forget neither that the unimaginable savagery committed by this sicko was made possible by the world representatives, at the forefront the United Nations, who stood by, their arms crossed, while Karadzic and associates effortlessly killed mothers, daughters and brothers, simply because the UN Members were findind it difficult to leave behind the principles of "peacekeeping" to adopt a more robust "peacemaking" stance. Thousands upon thousands died because of the inaction of the world in the face of a group of thugs, of which the leader, Karadzic, it has to be recalled, was born in the year that celebrated the end of another killing spree. It seems that, for world leaders, some lessons are difficult to learn.
I agree with Mr. Sulijagic--while this is, understandably, only a 'comment,' it is hardly a balanced and nuanced review of the state of international criminal tribunals. While certainly it highlights the arguments celebrating the efficacy of trials, it's hardly as clean and tidy as the article makes it seem. Thus, it is quite a stretch to say that "International criminal courts are on a roll" simply because of the issuance of an arrest warrant for Bashir and the capture of Karadzic. Most important, the fallout from the ICC warrant for Bashir has yet to be seen; moreover, many see the case against Bashir for genocide (as opposed to war crimes) to be legally unsound and thus a dangerous gamble.
Moreover, the allusion to Mugabe is a bit misleading. One could (and many do) say that Mugabe's stranglehold on power is in fact a response to the imminence of his prosecution--that if he were afforded impunity (as morally unpalatable as that would be) and allowed to retire comfortably, he might be more willing to relinquish power, and thus you'd see (or have seen) an end to violence.
Finally, doesn't Valero mean "genocidaire" instead of what he's written, "genocidier"?
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Good article.
Posted by Luis A del Valle | July 24, 2008 1:51 AM