Bosnia War Crimes Panel Frees Ailing Serb

A United Nations tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslav federation ordered the provisional release Wednesday of a Bosnian Serb general whose arrest under suspicious circumstances had severely strained the Balkan peace process.

One of the tribunal’s two presiding judges, Claude Jorda, ruled at a hearing in The Hague that Bosnian Serb army Gen. Djordje Djukic should be released for health reasons and be allowed to return to his family home in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and Yugoslavia.

The move came amid reports that the general is suffering from pancreatic cancer and has only a short time to live.

“The judges are satisfied that Gen. Djukic’s medical condition is incompatible with any form of detention,” said a statement by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

In ordering the release, Jorda rejected a prosecution request to withdraw the indictment against Djukic, which claimed that his role as a senior logistics officer in the Bosnian Serb army made him partly responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians during the shelling of Sarajevo. Jorda also refused a defense appeal to drop the charges because of a lack of evidence.

“The indictment will stand, and if his health improves he could be asked to return,” tribunal spokeswoman Christiane van Oosterhout said. “The release is provisional.”

However, other tribunal officials admitted that there seemed little prospect that Djukic will ever return to The Hague.

Djukic was arrested in Sarajevo on Jan. 30 along with a second Bosnian Serb army officer, Col. Aleksa Krsmanovic, after their vehicle turned--apparently in error--onto a road held by government forces in the Bosnian capital.

Although neither officer was on the tribunal’s list of suspected war criminals, both were taken to The Hague for questioning amid objections by Bosnian Serbs.

In protest of the arrests and extradition, Bosnian Serb army officers boycotted several sessions of a joint military commission established to monitor implementation of the peace accord brokered in Ohio.

But in The Hague, it became clear that tribunal prosecutors were more interested in both men as potential witnesses to strengthen indictments of others than as war criminals themselves.

But when neither agreed to talk, Chief Prosecutor Richard Goldstone indicted Djukic for his role in the shelling of Sarajevo.

Krsmanovic was released last week because of a lack of evidence.