Doctor butcher

 

 

Who would have believed that a man who once trained as a qualified psychiatrist would one day engineer one of the worst incidents of manslaughter in the post World War era? But such are the ways of the world. In what is being seen as a major triumph for the activists and agencies investigating incidents of manslaughter in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic, arguably one of the planet’s most wanted genocide perpetrators for the role he played in the mass execution of close to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, was arrested on July 21 in a raid in Serbia that ended a nerve-wracking hunt of 13 years.

Karadzic's precise location of arrest has not been disclosed yet, but unconfirmed reports suggest that the arrest was done by the Serbian secret police somewhere in the suburbs of Belgrade. Karadzic is seen as a nationalist hero of sorts among extreme right-wing Serbians – the sort of people who still feel pride in being called Chetniks. He is said to have dodged arrest for so long by growing a beard, shaving off his grey hair – his trademark during Balkan conflict days – and by masquerading himself as a Serbian Orthodox priest. He reportedly spent a lot of his time hiding in the pigeonhole-like caves of the mountain in Eastern Bosnia. He took the identity of a slain soldier, and the fake paper was issued in Ruma with the help of Slobodan Medic, a local paramilitary leader who is facing trial for similar charges.

What is interesting is that his arrest came just a week after the new pro-Western coalition government in Serbia came into power. This coalition’s dominant aspiration is to bring Serbia into the fold of European Union, which had set delivering indicted war criminals to The Hague as a precondition for the membership. The prosecution had earlier charged Karadzic with genocide, persecution and deportation. It has been reported that Karadzic will represent himself in the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague. However, his case is too shaky to stand.

Talking exclusively to TSI, Timothy William Waters, a Bosnian conflict expert and a member of the team that prepared the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, said: “The agency has gathered abundant substantiation of his crimes. It looks more like an open and shut case. However, the real problem is to prove the charge of genocide per se. I mean, the threshold has been set so high that to prove that a particular crime has been done with intensions of ethnic cleansing, has become extremely difficult.” As both sides prepare for a marathon battle, all eyes from Zagreb to Sarajevo are set on The Hague.