U.S. Called “Gutless” in Search to Find Balkan War Crimes Suspects

It was born amid ringing promises about the rule of law and the West’s resolve to do the right thing. Madeleine Albright, now secretary of State, lauded the “commitment of the international community to bring those responsible for atrocities in the former Yugoslavia to justice.”

That was nearly seven years ago. Today, trials at the U.N.-established International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia grind on, but the most notorious suspects--Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic--remain at large.

At the moment, officials at the tribunal say, there seems to be little genuine zeal in the United States or on the part of most of its allies to go after the suspects known here simply as “the big fish.”

“I’m very angry at what has supposedly been a U.S. policy to arrest war criminals, but where very little gets done,” said William Stuebner, a former tribunal liaison in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who is now an advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington. “There’s been plenty of lip service, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the U.S. were too gutless to try to arrest anyone.”

Recently, the Clinton administration offered up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Karadzic, Mladic or Milosevic, or any other suspect indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide in Yugoslavia’s violent breakup.

The reward, and the Wild West-style “wanted” posters printed by the State Department, received generous media coverage. At the war crimes tribunal, housed in a former insurance company headquarters here, officials say the posters may help. But then they pull out tally sheets to chart how NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia have performed when it comes to capturing suspects.

Last U.S. Arrest Bid in September 1998

According to tribunal officials, U.S. soldiers have mounted only three arrest operations to catch people in Bosnia accused of mass murder, torture, rape or other crimes, and none since September 1998. The French have captured a single indictee for shipment to The Hague, tribunal sources say, and killed another in bizarre circumstances.

Only the British seem to have taken extensive and recurrent risks to snatch and detain suspects off the street, and that only since Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor Party came to power in 1997. The first arrest attempts by the NATO-led force followed the change of government in London by less than two months. On their own or with the Dutch, the British so far have made at least 12 of the 20 arrest attempts.

“No country has provided more material resources to the tribunal than the United States,” one official here said. “But it’s the British who’ve done the most, by far, to give us people to put on trial.”

According to the tribunal’s Web site, of the 93 indictees whose names have been made public, 28 are still at large. The Washington-based Coalition for International Justice says at least three suspects still live in Bosnia’s U.S.-controlled zone: Blagoje Simic, Ranko Cesic and Dragan Nikolic.

Karadzic is believed to circulate with his bodyguards among a network of safe houses in the French zone and now might be in the city of Foca, near the border with Milosevic’s Yugoslavia. Mladic is reported to have moved to Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

Suspects Treated With Kid Gloves

Why the gulf between the rhetoric that surrounded the tribunal’s creation May 25, 1993--when Albright, a driving force behind it, was U.N. ambassador--and the follow-through? Analysts say the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization treated war crimes suspects with kid gloves for years, not wanting to endanger the 1995 accords that brought an uneasy armed peace to Bosnia’s warring Croats, Muslims and Serbs.

These days, Balkan realpolitik remains part of the calculus, as do domestic political considerations, the analysts say. An official at NATO headquarters in Brussels, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the orders of the 24,000-strong Stabilization Force in Bosnia, known as SFOR, instruct soldiers to detain indictees “when we come across them, but there is no mandate to pursue them.”

The British, who have taken to surrounding suspects’ cars with masked soldiers and smashing in the side windows to haul them out, have interpreted these instructions aggressively. The Americans and French have been cautious.

Undeniably, there is a risk. Eighteen indictees have been bundled off to The Hague to date as a result of SFOR operations, but two others were shot to death as they resisted the soldiers trying to seize them, said Canadian Army Maj. Yvon Desjardins, an SFOR spokesman.

To critics of the prudent approach, taking few or no risks is far more damaging to the tribunal’s reputation--not to mention to the cause of justice.

“I can’t believe Karadzic is still free,” said Nina Bang-Jensen, executive director of the Coalition for International Justice. “This is the man who has been indicted for genocide--twice. And he’s walking around among our soldiers.”

Frustrated at the state of affairs, Carla del Ponte, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, visited NATO headquarters in February to ask alliance leaders to assemble a multinational task force to hunt down accused war criminals.

Tribunal officials don’t expect any action from the United States until the November elections at the earliest.

“The Gore campaign will start calling the shots more and more in the White House, and they will not want to risk any Americans getting killed overseas before election day,” one predicted.

It is the French behavior that some officials here find the most inexplicable, if not suspicious. The first arrest by French troops of a Bosnian suspect, Mitar Vasiljevic, came Jan. 25--a month before a state visit by French President Jacques Chirac to the Netherlands, tribunal officials say.

The French claim three additional arrests, but tribunal officials say at least two of those were carried out by German commandos operating in the French sector.

In a strange incident, one war crimes suspect, Dragan Gagovic, former police chief of Foca, was shot and killed by French soldiers at a roadside checkpoint Jan. 9, 1999, as he was driving five girls home from a karate tournament. The Bosnian Serb, said by Stuebner to be known never to carry a gun, had been seen daily for more than a year after his 1996 indictment taking an evening aperitif with French officers.

Had Gagovic lived, a tribunal official said, he might have testified “about the relationship with the French and the arrangements they had.”

Two years ago, the Washington Post reported that a plan to capture Karadzic was canceled for fear that he had been tipped off by a French liaison, Maj. Herve Gourmillon. Stung by the accusations, the French accused the Americans of being the gutless ones when it came to attempting arrests. When Chirac visited the tribunal Feb. 29, he asserted France’s determination to capture all remaining suspects, especially “the one who embodies ethnic cleansing at its most abominable, that is to say, Radovan Karadzic.”

Chuck Sudetic, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine who worked for nine years covering Yugoslavia’s violent breakup, arrives at a different conclusion in his detailed study, “The Reluctant Gendarme,” published in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. He believes that the French have balked at apprehending key suspects in war crimes cases for fear of what the suspects might say on the witness stand.

During Bosnia’s 1992-95 civil war and after, “the French were the ones who had the most access to these people--Karadzic, Mladic, even Milosevic,” Sudetic said in an interview.

Rumors of Secret Deals Between French, Serbs

There are persistent rumors that the French, who have historical ties to the Serbs, might have made secret deals to win the release of French soldiers and aircraft crews taken hostage in Bosnia.

But France might not be the only Western power with an embarrassing past. U.S. diplomats and generals met with Karadzic and Mladic, as well as with Milosevic, who since has been indicted for war crimes in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, Serbia. There were even rumors of a deal between Milosevic and the Americans to prevent U.S. casualties among the NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia.

Mladic, the Bosnian Serb’s chief military commander, lived openly in the U.S.-controlled sector of Bosnia for a year and a half after being indicted. In 1997, according to tribunal sources, U.S. troops arrived to search the bomb shelters in the town of Han Pijesak, where he was believed to be living, but backed down after a confrontation with Bosnian Serbs.

If put on the stand in The Hague, the high-ranking suspects could well embarrass Western countries by divulging--or making up--stories of how they connived.

“As defense witnesses, they could call in half the Western diplomats who were in Sarajevo, half of the Western military who were there,” Sudetic said. “Nobody wants this--not even the United States.”