U.S. Troops in Bosnia Seize Genocide Suspect

U.S. troops made their first Bosnian war crimes arrest Thursday, grabbing a former prison camp commander who called himself the “Serb Adolf” and who stands accused of genocide.

Goran Jelisic, 29, a Bosnian Serb, was detained in the northeastern city of Bijeljina as he left his apartment building. U.S. soldiers bundled Jelisic into an unmarked van, witnesses said, and put him on a military flight to an international war crimes court at The Hague.

The arrest occurred without incident, a NATO spokesman said.

Jelisic is accused of ordering or carrying out, in especially chilling fashion, the murder of scores of Muslims who were rounded up when Serb paramilitary forces took over the northern riverfront city of Brcko in 1992.

Thursday’s operation was the fourth seizing of a suspect by NATO or U.N. peacekeeping forces since December 1995 peace accords ended the 3 1/2-year war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it was the first time U.S. troops provided more than logistical support.

With 30,000 or so troops in Bosnia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has come under mounting criticism for its failure to arrest the most prominent of more than 70 Serbs, Muslims and Croats indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Twenty-one people have surrendered or been arrested on orders of the tribunal, but the leading suspect, former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, remains at large and continues to exert considerable political influence in the part of the country his supporters control.

Still, genocide is the most serious charge that Hague prosecutors can bring, and Jelisic is only the second person accused of genocide to be brought before the court.

“The prosecutor is confident that the [NATO] mandate will permit similar interventions in the future,” U.N. spokesman Alex Ivanko said in welcoming the arrest.

Bracing for possible retaliation, NATO-led forces and international officials who are stationed throughout the country were cautioned to be on guard. The U.S. Embassy issued a travel warning for Americans.

In July, British troops shot and killed a Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect when he allegedly resisted arrest. Bosnian Serb militants responded with a series of minor grenade and gun attacks on foreigners, including the stabbing of a U.S. soldier, although no serious injuries were reported.

Western officials said they expect reaction to be different this time, in part because moderate Serbs are in the ascendancy and because Jelisic was regarded, even by his fellow Serbs, as a brutish, crazy thug. As of Thursday afternoon, with American and Russian forces on patrol, Bijeljina remained calm. Children walked home from school, and radio stations played folk music.

For the last 2 1/2 years, after his indictment, Jelisic had made no effort to conceal his movements in Bijeljina, a bustling city near Bosnia’s border with Yugoslavia, residents said. In recent months he had boasted that he was not afraid to turn himself in, providing he would get something in return. In an interview with a Bijeljina radio station last year, he had practically dared NATO to arrest him. And for the last several weeks, he had served as bodyguard to a senior Bosnian Serb official.

Despite that kind of profile in a city with a sizable international presence, NATO officials said they moved against him now after only recently spotting him. Jelisic did not notice he had been detected, and NATO forces were able to mount an operation with minimum risk to themselves and no risk to the public, said British Maj. Peter Clarke, a NATO spokesman in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

Just before 8 Thursday morning, Jelisic was headed from his apartment building to a bookstore he owns, witnesses said. Two unmarked vans were parked on the street. Suddenly, American troops burst from the vans, restrained Jelisic and hauled him away. They placed NATO insignia on the vehicles as they departed, the witnesses said.

“It was quick as lightning,” Jelisic’s wife, Ana, observing from their ninth-floor flat, told a Belgrade, Yugoslavia, news agency.

Hague prosecutors believe that they have a strong case against Jelisic, who commanded the Luka detention camp in Brcko, where hundreds of Muslims and Croats were held and many tortured, raped or killed. A Hague forensic team exhumed 20 or so bodies from a mass grave on the outskirts of Brcko last year for possible use as evidence.

Jelisic was so outspoken in his stated goal of killing Muslims that he called himself the Serb Adolf, after Hitler. Charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, breach of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws or customs of war, he was indicted along with Ranko Cesic, another warden at the Luka camp.

According to the Hague indictment, Jelisic, Cesic and camp guards under their command routinely “entered Luka’s main hangar where most detainees were kept, selected detainees for interrogation, beat them and then often shot and killed them . . . usually at close range in the head or back. Often, the accused and camp guards forced the detainees who were to be shot to put their heads on a metal grate that drained into the Sava River, so that there would be minimal cleanup after the shootings.”