Global Policy Forum

A Bosnian Serb leader indicted on genocide charges remains at large -- and few seem to care

Russ Baker *

Celebici is a remote gnat of a place. A few dozen houses and a church, a couple of hours way up a rough road from the ragged Bosnian hills, surrounded by forested peaks. But it was as big as the headlines it generated when NATO-led forces staged Operation Daybreak there in February 2002, ostensibly hoping to net Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who had been indicted by The Hague's war crimes tribunal for helping to lead a genocide in 1992-1995 that killed up to 200,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslims. Helicopters disgorged black-masked troops who kicked in doors and blew open locks as they conducted a door-to-door search. They left empty-handed. Operation Daybreak remains the only serious action the West is known to have conducted to pick up Karadzic.

Like Osama bin Laden, Karadzic is well known and physically distinctive. A tall man with a big belly, a dimpled chin and a dramatic gray bouffant, he ought to be difficult to hide. Like Saddam Hussein, he is considered a genocidal murderer whose most horrible crimes were committed a decade ago. And, as in the case of bin Laden, the fact that he remains at large is a cause of great instability throughout a strategically crucial region.

Eight years after the Dayton peace accords -- following a process that was supposed to lead to reunification, and despite the efforts of hundreds of foreign aid workers and the expenditure of more than $5 billion -- Bosnia remains fractious and fractured. Efforts to create unity and long-term peace have been frustrated by the continued dominance in the ethnic Serbian state-within-a-state (known as Republika Srpska) of a corrupt clique said to be controlled by Karadzic. And, of course, the fate of the entire area holds lessons for other Western efforts at democracy- and nation-building, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Karadzic's continued freedom leaves the huge numbers of ethnic Muslims and Croats who fled Bosnia during the war, and who have been slowly returning to their prewar homes, with a sense that all has not yet been put right. At the same time, his aura of invincibility has grown among the 700,000 Bosnian Serbs.

The NATO military command has increasingly issued tough statements and conducted a number of high-profile "raids" that failed to capture Karadzic. Serious observers consider these nothing but publicity efforts and perhaps attempts to send messages to the Bosnian Serb leadership. For example, troops twice conducted search operations in Pale, Karadzic's wartime capital and the home of his wife and daughter -- surely not the most likely place for Karadzic to hide.

There are many obstacles to finding the man, ranging from the ruggedness of the terrain to the fierce loyalty of many locals toward Karadzic. But perhaps the largest obstacle is that the United States and its allies have not dedicated real resources to chasing him down.

Many of the NATO soldiers -- 13,000 troops from 35 countries, down from 60,000 after the war -- share no common language, and those few who can speak to soldiers from other countries aren't necessarily inclined to do so. Each contingent has gotten a reputation. American troops -- now just 1, 500, all National Guardsmen, dentists from Ohio and laborers from New York -- are not exactly Special Forces quality and tend to stay pretty close to base. Italian and French troops like to live it up and have perhaps gotten too cozy with some locals. The Brits are the most enthusiastic about actually doing something. And, given their experience among a hostile, armed population in Northern Ireland, they're the best prepared -- and show it through deft use of intelligence and of lightning-fast raids.

So far, they have apprehended most of the war criminals -- half of the 24 arrests reported by the NATO force to date have been in their zone. But the areas where Bosnians suspect Karadzic is hiding are controlled by Italian, French, and German troops, none of whom seem eager to fire their guns. The Germans I met in Celebici made clear that it would absolutely not be desirable, for obvious historical reasons, to have Germany in the forefront of a bloody international military incident that involved capturing someone accused of murdering large numbers of innocent people. The French, technically in charge of the area, have been historically close with the Serbs and opposed the creation of the Hague tribunal.

On the morning of the Celebici raid, according to military sources, a French officer took a call from a Republika Srpska police officer inquiring about the unusually large NATO presence that day. In the conversation, which was monitored by peacekeeping forces, the Frenchman obliquely referred to the area as being of interest "today in particular."

Capturing Karadzic is especially challenging because ordinary people revere him and because some extraordinarily ruthless and powerful people are joined with him at the hip. Everywhere one travels on both sides of the border between Bosnia and Serbia, and in neighboring Montenegro, where Karadzic was born and raised, he is a kind of folk hero, celebrated for defending orthodoxy against Muslim aggression and thereby playing a righteous role in what amounts to a 500-year- old quarrel. The Hague's evidence of his war crimes is dismissed as exaggerated, biased or trumped up. His calls for a single country uniting all ethnic Serbs, coupled with his credentials as a psychiatrist and author of poems, folk songs and children's books, have been used to polish his image as a hero. Calendars of Karadzic hang at bus stations, and on Christmas Day 2002, thousands of Bosnian Serbs received a text-message holiday greeting from Karadzic on their mobile phones. And last year, pro-Karadzic posters mysteriously appeared all over the ethnic Serb capital of Banja Luka, although authorities, undoubtedly worried about the reaction of Western forces, had them removed within hours. Yet many of the Serbs who defend Karadzic may be motivated less by nationalist fervor than by self-interest.

Karadzic sat -- and presumably continues to sit -- at the center of an intricate web of political, legal, military and police and financial power. The network gained considerable wealth through wartime profiteering and won favorable treatment from the Karadzic and post-Karadzic regimes in Republika Srpska. Many government officials, including Cabinet ministers, are deeply involved in the underground economy and would potentially face charges and long prison sentences if the semi-independent republic were ever cleaned up. In the past year or so, Western forces in Bosnia have moved to crack down on the most corrupt among the army's top brass, but the army remains loyal to Karadzic. Republika Srpska is the only part of the former Yugoslavia that has yet to arrest a single war-crimes suspect -- despite being required to do so under the Dayton accords that ended the war.

Karadzic's cronies spend about $200,000 a month protecting him, according to foreign diplomats. A sort of medieval tithing system, enforced by tough guys, includes a "tax" collected by civilians carrying police identification and skimmed profits from foreign electricity sales. U.S. intelligence services have tracked gasoline from Saddam Hussein's Iraq to merchants and distributors with close links to Karadzic.

Republika Srpska also makes donations to the Orthodox Church for the ostensible purpose of rebuilding religious structures destroyed in the war -- donations that, by law, cannot be monitored or even audited. Officials in Banja Luka and foreign diplomats believe that some of this money finds its way to Karadzic. Hague prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said monitored telephone communications had revealed that Karadzic was hiding at a mountaintop Orthodox monastery in Ostrog, northwest of the capital. Church officials denied sheltering Karadzic but praised him nonetheless. And the Orthodox archbishop of Sarajevo, welcoming new NATO troops from Greece (another Orthodox country), is said to have extended to them Karadzic's warm regards.

Last month, the United States suspended millions of dollars in assistance to Serbia for lack of cooperation, including failure to hand over Karadzic's military chief and fellow war crimes indictee, Ratko Mladic. When officials learned the same month that Karadzic might be in the village of Zaovine, troops raided Pale instead. Not surprisingly, they came up empty-handed. It all seems like a strange way to treat an accused mass murderer.

If capturing Saddam Hussein was as important a milestone for Iraq's future as the White House says it is, then what does it say about the future of the strategically important Balkans that an indicted war criminal of Karadzic's reputed brutality is allowed to roam free?

Few doubt Karadzic can be apprehended, but, as the years pass, many wonder about the will of those with the power to do so. The eye of the powerful has turned away from this fragile land, and increasingly one hears the refrain, "Radovan who?"

About the Author: Russ Baker is a New York-based investigative reporter who has spent much of the past two years in the Balkan region.