[7月24日] Arrest of Radovan Karadzic: Why Now and Who's Next?

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By Sonja Pace
London
23 July 2008
The lawyer for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic say he will conduct his own defense before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, where he faces charges of genocide and war crimes committed in Bosnia in the 1990s. Karadzic was arrested near Belgrade on Monday and could be extradited to The Hague within days, but the fact that he's been on the run for nearly 13 years and working and living in Belgrade in disguise raises questions over who knew, why he was arrested now and whether his one time military commander, Ratko Mladic, might soon face the same fate. Sonja Pace has this report from London.

The man with the long white hair, thick beard and spectacles went by the name of Dragan Dabic and had seemingly no trouble peddling his skills as a traditional healer. The disguise worked well enough to allow him to live and work in Belgrade and even his neighbors insisted that they had no idea that behind this façade was Radovan Karadzic, one time leader of the Bosnian Serbs and war crimes suspect.

But Radovan Karadzic's time ran out.

Serbian officials announced that Karadzic had been arrested, questioned, had his identity established and was then handed the indictment from the International Criminal Court.

Western leaders welcomed the arrest and many quickly noted it was proof the newly-elected government of President Boris Tadic was committed to cooperating with the international tribunal and to getting Serbia into the European Union.

Speaking with VOA from Belgrade, James Lyon, the senior Balkan analyst for the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based risk assessment organization, said there is no doubt that President Tadic and his party are committed to Europe, but he says there are doubts they could have engineered the arrest.

"The difficulty is that they hadn't yet been in power long enough to establish control of any sort over the police or over the secret police. Let's keep in mind they just appointed a director of the secret police four days before this happened, that was certainly not enough time to go in and get the ball rolling," said Lyon.

The question remains, who decided it was time to give Karadzic up. Balkan analyst Svetozar Rajak at the London School of Economics says while the government may not have had time to organize the operation, some individuals could have.

"We know that the outgoing head of the intelligence services, Mr. Bilatovic was praised in the past even by Carla del Ponte [former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] as cooperating with western intelligence services in pursuing and trying to apprehend both Karadzic and [Ratko] Mladic," said Rajak.