French Snare Major Bosnian Crimes Suspect

French-led peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina blew open the door of a house before dawn Monday and arrested the highest-ranking Balkan war crimes suspect captured yet, Momcilo Krajisnik, a longtime ally of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

Under secret indictment for genocide, crimes against humanity and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, the wartime president of the Bosnian Serb parliament was being transferred to The Hague, site of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

“This is amazing. This is by far the most significant arrest on behalf of the tribunal,” prosecution spokesman Paul Risley said in The Hague. “This is a senior Bosnian Serb figure second only to Karadzic, present at virtually every high-level meeting where decisions were made that resulted in violence and the loss of life across Bosnia.”

Critics, including officials at the tribunal, have castigated Western peacekeepers in Bosnia, especially the French and Americans, for what they see as a singular lack of zeal in pursuing such suspects. NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, on a visit to the United States, called Krajisnik’s arrest proof of the alliance’s resolve.

“The net is closing. It is time to turn yourselves in,” Robertson said, addressing other suspects still at large. They include Karadzic, wartime Bosnian Serb military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Sources at The Hague, at NATO headquarters in Brussels and in Bosnia said Krajisnik, 55, was grabbed at 3:17 a.m. in a commando operation in the village of Pale, the Bosnian Serb wartime headquarters, nine miles southeast of the capital, Sarajevo.

Mirko Banjac, a Serbian deputy speaker of the Bosnian parliament, told reporters that French-led soldiers of the Bosnian Stabilization Force, or SFOR, dynamited the door of the home of Krajisnik’s parents, tied up his sons, locked his parents in the kitchen and spirited away the suspect in his pajamas and bare feet.

“They took my dad away,” Krajisnik’s son Milos, 21, told Associated Press. “Some of them spoke Serbian, some English, but mostly French.” He said he and his brother, Njegos, 19, were tied up facing the floor during the arrest.

An aide to Krajisnik told Agence France-Presse that the former parliamentary leader offered no resistance to the soldiers. Canadian Forces Maj. Yvon Desjardins, an SFOR spokesman in Sarajevo, said none of the peacekeepers were injured.

Though three Bosnian Serb major generals have been arrested by North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops and transferred for trial to The Hague, Robertson said Krajisnik’s arrest was that of “the highest-ranking person indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia thus far.”

“It is good news for justice, and good news for the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” the NATO secretary-general said in a statement released in Brussels.

Risley called it a “turning point” for the 7-year-old tribunal because of the central policymaking role Krajisnik allegedly played during Bosnia’s savage 1992-95 war.

Krajisnik was president of the Bosnian Serb assembly from 1990 to 1995, when it was controlled by the ultranationalist Serbian Democratic Party, to which he and Karadzic belonged. According to prosecutors, the parliamentary leader consistently rejected attempts by the United Nations and other international organizations to bring peace to Bosnia.

“He was involved as a principal political leader in bringing about the military actions that led to the detention of thousands, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands and the deaths of thousands,” Risley said. Like Karadzic, the prosecution spokesman said, Krajisnik is accused of genocide in the brutal siege of Sarajevo, the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims from the city of Srebrenica and the wholesale “ethnic cleansing” of the northwestern town of Prijedor.

A statement from SFOR issued in Sarajevo said that “while serving in a leadership position, acting alone or in concert with others, [Krajisnik] planned or ordered the destruction of Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat ethnic groups in numerous municipalities within Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

Robertson said the crimes the former Bosnian Serb official is charged with include murder, willful killing, extermination, deportation and inhumane acts.

When Karadzic’s indictment for war crimes forced him to abandon his public responsibilities, Krajisnik replaced him. After the 1995 Dayton accords brought Bosnia’s armed conflict to an end, Krajisnik served from 1996 to 1998 in Bosnia’s collective presidency, along with a Croat and a Muslim representative.

In general elections in September 1998, he ran for another presidential term but was defeated by Zivko Radisic.

A widower and a father of three, Krajisnik is an economist by training and worked as an executive in a Bosnian company that made components for Russian nuclear reactors.

The public statements on Krajisnik’s arrest implied that it had been prepared for and carried out with relative dispatch. He was secretly indicted by tribunal chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte on Feb. 21, and the indictment was confirmed by a judge five days later.

Last Friday, for unannounced reasons, Del Ponte traveled to Sarajevo, a U.N. spokesman said. On Monday, the chief prosecutor said the arrest was a vindication of her “strategy of indicting persons at the topmost levels of responsibility,” and she called specifically for the international community to detain Karadzic so that he can be tried jointly with Krajisnik.

The arrest came five days before weekend municipal elections in Bosnia. There were concerns that the arrest might boost the ultranationalist Serb cause or even lead to violence. Del Ponte addressed those worries in her statement, saying the indictment was a matter of individual criminal responsibility and not an attack on all Bosnian Serbs.

According to the Hague tribunal, 39 war crimes suspects are now in custody, with a 40th on provisional release. The three suspects commonly known as the “big fish”--Karadzic, Mladic and Milosevic--are still free. Milosevic is under indictment for war crimes in Kosovo, which is a province of Serbia, the rump Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. Karadzic reportedly moves among a network of safe houses in Bosnia. Last week, a Washington Post reporter in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital, saw Mladic at a soccer game.

Well aware of charges that NATO forces don’t take enough risks to make arrests, Robertson said Monday’s arrest was the sixth since he became alliance secretary-general Oct. 14. The French, whom some suspect of complicity with Bosnian Serb leaders, were also quick to announce that their troops had spearheaded operations in Pale.

“This is not our first arrest,” French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Catherine Wallisky said. “French forces have now been involved in five.”