War crime suspects elude law
BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro – It’s a $10 million question: Where are the world’s two most wanted war crimes fugitives?
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, have been on the run since the Bosnian war ended in 1995 – frustrating and almost mocking those who want them captured and tried.
Late last month, chief U.N. prosecutor Carla Del Ponte declared that Karadzic would be arrested within 24 hours. But both he and Mladic are still at large, despite the $5 million per head promised by the United States for information leading to their capture.
The two, who top the U.N. tribunal’s wanted list, stand accused of numerous war crimes, including genocide in the 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica, the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since World War II.
Top Serbia-Montenegro officials and Western diplomats have told the Associated Press that Karadzic and Mladic are relying on disguises, multiple hiding places and a shadowy network of supporters to tip them off whenever NATO-led patrols get close.
Karadzic is believed to be hiding in the mountains of eastern Bosnia, somewhere near the town of Foca on the border with Serbia. Those who have seen him say he has shaved off his trademark bushy hair, has grown a large beard and dresses in black robes like a Serbian Orthodox priest.
Karadzic often changes his hideouts, including monasteries and refurbished mountain caves, officials say. In the past, he traveled in ambulances with flashing lights to zip through NATO checkpoints undetected. Now, he travels only at night and avoids main roads, using forest paths through rugged Bosnian mountains.
Whenever informants tell him troops are closing in, he flees into neighboring Serbia, where NATO can’t operate.
His associates say Karadzic has often slipped into Pale, the Bosnian Serb wartime capital, for nighttime visits to his wife, Ljiljana; daughter, Sonja; and son, Sasa.
He reportedly also has visited his aging mother in the mountains of neighboring Montenegro, and once went to Budva, a popular tourist town on the tiny republic’s Adriatic coast.
Those in his inner circle have even claimed that Karadzic once sneaked into Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital his troops shelled relentlessly for three years, and had coffee with friends in a cafe.
Locals, they say, failed to recognize him in disguise.
Mladic, who is accused of leading the Srebrenica slaughter, lived freely in Belgrade until former President Slobodan Milosevic was toppled in October 2000 and handed over to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
Mladic showed up openly at soccer stadiums, dined in plush Belgrade restaurants and visited his daughter’s grave in Belgrade.
When, under Western pressure, Serbia’s new pro-democracy authorities signaled that they might have to hand Mladic over to the tribunal, he apparently left the Serbian capital for Bosnia.
But he still has the protection of Milosevic’s allies in the Serb-led army. In 2001, he was seen dining in a Belgrade fish restaurant also frequented by diplomats. Only last month, Mladic was seen driving a battered, boxy Yugo car in Belgrade, without the six black-clad bodyguards with shaven heads who typically escort him.
A U.S. diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mladic, like Karadzic, is believed to be slipping in and out of Bosnia and Serbia.