[7月23日] US War Crimes Envoy Hails Karadzic Arrest

>> Download MP3 Audio
By David Gollust
State Department
22 July 2008
The U.S. State Department's top expert on war crimes issues is welcoming Serbia's arrest of former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and says it bodes well for the Belgrade government's future in Europe. Ambassador Clint Williamson says the arrest should be worrisome for former Bosnian-Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, who is still at large. VOA's David Gollust reports from the State Department.

Karadzic, indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, was considered Europe's most- wanted man.

His apprehension in Serbia after 13 years on the run was especially satisfying for Williamson, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues - a career federal prosecutor who worked on the Yugoslavia tribunal staff for seven years.

In an interview with VOA, Williamson said the four-year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina which began in 1992 was very much driven by the agenda of Karadzic, who used a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Croats to stake out his Serb mini-state:

"He set up detention camps were people were kept in just the most horrible conditions, engaged in the siege of Sarajevo, where shells were continuously poured into the city, where snipers fired on civilians trying to go about their daily business," said Clint Williamson. "And then throughout the country there were many, many episodes of mass killings, where forces under his command attacked civilians and in order to drive them out, to eliminate their presence, just killed them by the thousands."

The arrest of Karadzic came just days after a commemoration in Bosnia - attended by Williamson - of the most notorious single criminal act of the war, the 1995 massacre of some eight thousand Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, a U.N. safe area overrun by Serb forces.

The U.S. envoy said NATO forces who intervened to end the war in 1996 probably had chances to capture Karadzic early-on but failed to do so and he went underground - hiding in Bosnia and later Serbia, presumably with some measure of official protection.