Warrants Sought for Bosnian Serb Leaders

As the international debate intensifies over whether and how to knock Bosnian Serb strongman Radovan Karadzic off the political stage before the crucial Bosnian election season, prosecutors for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia completed eight days of hearings Monday with calls for international arrest warrants against Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic.

The prosecutors charged that Karadzic and Mladic “instigated, planned and ordered the genocide and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” and they urged the tribunal formally to “certify” that Serbia has failed to cooperate with the Dayton, Ohio, peace agreement and apprehend the two.

Such certification, if granted, would be passed on to the U.N. Security Council, which could use it for a range of possible measures including the reimposition of economic sanctions on Serbia.

“There can be no doubt that both Dr. Karadzic, the supreme commander, and Gen. Mladic, the commander of the army, could have stopped this killing whenever they wanted,” said prosecutor Mark Harmon, who is normally a prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department.

Harmon pointed out that over the course of the 3 1/2-year Bosnian war, both men signed numerous cease-fire and anti-sniping agreements.

“After they were signed, the sniping stopped as quickly as water from a tap when its spigot is turned off,” Harmon said. “Both of the accused had the power to turn off this spigot but chose to leave it on” throughout most of the conflict.

The three-judge panel that has been hearing the evidence against Karadzic and Mladic is scheduled to rule Thursday, the first anniversary of the fall of the former U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica to the Bosnian Serbs. As many as 8,000 Muslim men and boys are thought to have disappeared in that disaster, in what is believed to be the worst single act of violence in Europe since the end of World War II.

Monday’s closing arguments summed up the testimony of 14 witnesses, whose accounts attempted to show the Bosnian war not as a chaotic series of disasters but as a systematic, well-orchestrated campaign to wipe out the country’s non-Serbian population.

The case against Mladic was graphic, with witnesses placing him at the scene of mass executions near Srebrenica.

But the case against the international community’s real quarry, Karadzic, remained much more general. The only piece of evidence that placed him at the scene of an atrocity was a Polish video, shot on the heights overlooking Sarajevo, the capital, in which the Bosnian Serb leader was seen grandly urging a Russian poet to fire a heavy machine gun down onto the city, sniper-style. The poet accepted the invitation.

“Dr. Karadzic treated Sarajevo and the lives of its citizens as his personal plaything,” Harmon said.

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The tribunal’s prosecutors said they hope to build a case against Karadzic based largely on a body of law known as the command responsibility doctrine, which they said is routinely used in U.S. military courts. It does not require a defendant to be personally involved in a crime but instead calls on prosecutors to show that he was in a position to know about the crime and to stop it but failed to do so.

Although little of the evidence was new, the hearings marked the first time prosecutors have knitted together the vast body of anecdotes, incidents, videos, intelligence and media reports on the overall conduct of the Bosnian war into a coherent sequence admissible in court.