Karadzic en route to tribunal
Appeal deadline passes with no paperwork received
THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader facing genocide and other charges for his role in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, was flown to the Netherlands early today to face a U.N war crimes tribunal after the Serbian government ordered his extradition, officials in Belgrade said.
Karadzic was captured last week after more than a decade in hiding and had been jailed in Belgrade while a Serbian war crimes court awaited a mailed appeal challenging his transfer. But no legal papers arrived by Tuesday evening, and the court apparently concluded that either none was coming or Karadzic had missed the deadline to challenge his transfer to the Netherlands.
Under cover of night early this morning, Karadzic was whisked by masked secret service agents to a plane bound for The Hague, officials said.
Karadzic will be held in a detention center, and in the coming days will appear briefly before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where he will have an opportunity to respond to the charges he faces. A trial is not expected to begin for several months.
The extradition followed a rally by several thousand hard-line nationalists in Belgrade on Tuesday evening. It was marked by clashes between small groups of stone-throwing extremists and riot police who used tear gas and fired rubber bullets.
The rally, estimated by police at 15,000, failed to attract anywhere near the numbers of people who flooded central Belgrade in February after the Serbian province Kosovo declared independence. That protest drew about 100,000; a group of extremists attacked and set fire to the U.S. Embassy.
As Karadzic continued to wait in a Belgrade jail Tuesday, a war crimes court in neighboring Bosnia convicted seven fellow Bosnian Serbs of genocide for their roles in mass killings in the city of Srebrenica in 1995, a time when Karadzic was their political leader.
A panel of judges in Sarajevo had heard evidence that the former policemen rounded up 1,000 people who were machine-gunned or killed by grenades in a warehouse after their surrender. The court sentenced them to 38 to 42 years in prison. Four other men were found not guilty.