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Top war crimes suspect Karadzic arrested in Serbia
BELGRADE, Serbia – Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, a war crimes fugitive and one of the world’s most wanted men, was arrested on Monday evening in a sweep by Serbian security forces, the country’s president said.
Karadzic has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia for genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He has been hiding since 1998.
President Boris Tadic’s office said in a statement that Karadzic was arrested “in an action by the Serbian security services.”
Karadzic, who was the leader of ethnic Serbs during the war that erupted with Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia, is accused of masterminding massacres that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as “scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.”
Radovan Karadžić is charged with genocide for the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. The indictment alleges that Radovan Karadžić also committed genocide, persecutions and other crimes when forces under his command killed non-Serbs during and after attacks on towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, rounded up thousands of non-Serbs and transferred them to detention facilities set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities. The indictment alleges that forces under Radovan Karadžić’s command killed, tortured, mistreated, and sexually assaulted non-Serbs in these camps.
Fugitive Karadzic arrested Friday on a bus in Belgrade suburbs
Former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic has already been brought before a judge at the war crimes court in Belgrade, in accordance with the law on co-operation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague.
His lawyer Sveta Vujacic has already claimed his client has not been treated fairly, he told reporters outside the Belgrade court building:
- “Radovan Karadzic was arrested last Friday morning on a public bus. By law he should have been taken to a judge immediately, so no one knows who arrested him, who ordered it and why he was held for three days until he was brought here tonight. Radovan Karadzic himself does not know that either. He just said that these people showed him a police badge and then he was taken to some place and kept in a room. What they did is absolutely against the law.”
Radovan Karadzic has chosen to remain silent and refuses food offered to him, according to his lawyer.
Fugitive Karadzic hid as bearded medic
(CNN) — Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic was working at a medical practice in Belgrade using a false identity and heavily disguised by a snow white beard before his arrest brought an end to more than a decade on the run, Serbian officials said.
Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister for relations with The Hague tribunal, said Mr Karadzic,63, had lived in a “very convincing” way as a non-Serbian citizen, using false documents giving him the name of “Dragan Dabic”.
“The fact that he was involved with alternative medicine, earning his money from practising alternative medicine, shows that he worked. He was working in a private practice and the last place where he had residence was New Belgrade,” he told a news conference in Belgrade.
Mr Vukcevic said: “[Mr Karadzic] walked around freely, even appeared in public places. The people who rented him the apartment did not know his true identity.”
who should be quickly convicted and hung by the neck.
No, this was no evil man. He was an ethnocentric nationalist doing his duty to country.
How can you explain what Israel is doing to the Palestinians if not for this duty to country crap?
Karadcic is an evil man, along the lines of Milosevich. Both used the lebensraum-related idea of Greater Serbia and the racist ideology of Serbian superiority to dehumanize their opponents to allow them to be destroyed. I will stick with the statement “evil”.
I don’t want to go to a comparison of Karadcic with Israel. The situations are different.
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It’s past midnight in the Netherlands, however this moment I have been waiting for since the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
Documentary: A Cry From the Grave Part 1 and Part 2
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."You made my day!!!
it took 13 years.
Fast forward 13 years, who’ll be meeting the same fate?
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SARAJEVO, Bosnia (Daily Telegraph) – Hundreds of Sarajevans have packed the city’s main street to celebrate the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader accused of genocide, after nearly 13 years on the run.
A Muslim member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Haris Silajdzic, welcomed the move by the Serbian authorities. “This brings back the belief in justice. It means stability for Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Mr Silajdzic said on national television.
An association of mothers of those killed in the Srebrenica massacre welcomed the arrest of the Bosnian Serb wartime leader. “Tonight’s event showed that a war criminal cannot hide forever.”
Karadzic arrest signals new direction
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."the arrest was overdue and made front and center as a condition to approval of its membership in the European Union
They knew what his car looked like (red mercedes). They knew restaurants he liked. They knew the identity of his wife/partner.
They didn’t pick him up due to his powerful protectors. He is still representing a strong current of Serbian opinion that they are a superior culture and a master ethnic group, and are natural rulers of the mongrels around them.
Apparently, they are mistaken..
It’s interesting how such beliefs about the superiority of an in-group can persist despite recent defeats and humiliations.
It’s just wrong to find humor in anything related to War Crimes, but his alter ego is fascinating: an alternative medicine proponent and practitioner? Really? It’s too bizarre to imagine.
Who was my herbalist in his previous career? Pol Pot?
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Karadzic was born on June 19, 1945, in Petnjica, Montenegro. He studied psychiatry and medicine at the University of Sarajevo during the 1960s and took courses in psychiatry and poetry at Columbia University from 1974 to 1975.
Karadzic, a Serb-Croat, in 1990 helped found the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), a party aimed at unifying Serbs into a common state, and became its president.
Two years later, he became president of the newly declared Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, later called “Republika Srpska.” During the next three years, he ordered Bosnian Serb forces to seize the majority of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
I asked Judge Cassese (ICC War Tribunal) how, regularly obliged to gaze into such an appalling abyss, he had kept from going mad himself. His face brightened. “Ah,” he said with a smile. “You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.”
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Doesn’t that say it all? Pain, Art, Pleasure.. Our ability to both feel and endure both Ppain and Pleasure grows in direct proportion to the Art in our lives..