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NEWS & LETTERS, October 2001

Column:
Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes

Serb war criminals

Indicted war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, directly responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men, as well as for the notorious rape camps, still remain at large nearly six months after the new Serbian government arrested Slobodan Milosevic.

The reasons behind this reveal the limited character of the changes in Serbia in the year since the overthrow of Milosevic. As late as this summer, the two remained extremely popular. It is said that, unlike Milosevic, these men did not murder Serbs, ignoring of course those Serbs who threw in their lot with multiethnic Bosnia. In addition, most Serbs continue to deny that their forces perpetrated genocide in Bosnia.

An aide to current Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic stated a few months ago that the government was reluctant to arrest Mladic and Karadzic because anyone who ordered those arrests "knows that he would be signing his own death warrant" (LE MONDE July 26, 2001). The pair also spends considerable time in the Serbian entity in Bosnia, under the noses of NATO, but according to a European NATO officer: "Americans oppose an arrest not because of the risks to the commandos, because the British or French are ready to conduct the operation without them, but because they fear reprisals and attacks. Karadzic and Mladic are, in the eyes of NATO and of Belgrade, protected by their status as heroes of 'Greater Serbia'."

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