NATO troops arrest top Karadzic aide
April 3, 2000SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- NATO troops on Monday detained a senior aide to Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic on suspicion of war crimes, said officials close to the international administrator of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Witnesses to the arrest also confirmed that Momcilo Krajisnik was arrested. They said NATO troops with the Bosnian peacekeeping force detained Krajisnik after blowing open a door to his home in Pale, southeast of Sarajevo, with explosives.
The officials, who demanded anonymity, said Krajisnik would be extradited to The Hague, Netherlands, to be tried by the U.N. war crimes tribunal.
Karadzic, the No. 1 war crimes suspect in Bosnia, remains at large. Krajisnik, his senior aide for most of the Bosnian war, replaced him as the leader of Bosnia's Serbs after Karadzic was forced to give up public functions because of his indictment by the war crimes tribunal.
Officials close to Wolfgang Petritsch, the international administrator of Bosnia, said Krajisnik was detained on a secret indictment.
Nicknamed "Mister No" by foreign mediators who met with him early in the Bosnian conflict, Krajisnik is in his mid-50s. An economist by training, he was an executive of the largest company in Bosnia, Energoinvest, which made parts for Russian nuclear reactors.
Krajisnik became speaker of the Bosnian parliament in 1990, before Serbs walked out and the war began. After the war ended in 1995, he served as the Serb representative on the three-member Bosnian presidency, along with a Croat and a Muslim.
During his election campaign, he and other senior leaders of the Serb Democratic Party advocated Serb secession from Bosnia. Election officials made them apologize publicly on the eve of the vote.
Aides describe the widower and father of three as conservative and pious. He considers separation based on ethnicity and religion to be natural. Like other leaders in the Bosnian conflict, he was rumored to have enriched himself through illegal dealings during and after the war.
Richard Holbrooke,U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, applauded the arrest of Krajisnik. "This is a great day for those of us who have fought for a single multiethnic country in Bosnia," said Holbrooke, who worked to bring about the Dayton peace accords for Bosnia in 1995.
Holbrooke called Krajisnik "one of the worst of the people in the region -- a racist, a separatist, a war criminal ..."
Following the arrest, the chief prosecutor for the tribunal, Carla del Ponte, called once more for the capture of Dr. Karadzic and said the two men should stand trial jointly because they were charged with the same heinous crimes. The tribunal is clearly pressing NATO to make that trial a reality by arresting Dr. Karadzic, who was indicted in 1995 on charges of genocide.
Mrs. del Ponte, who succeeded Louise Arbour as chief tribunal prosecutor, has stepped up demands on NATO members for intelligence support and military action against suspected war criminals in the Balkans. Her demands helped stiffen NATO's spine, American officials said.
The indictment against Mr. Krajisnik listed some 40 towns and villages where Muslims and Croats were driven out by force. It also listed hundreds of people who were massacred and specified 11 prison camps where non-Serbs were detained and tortured, executed or deported under orders from Mr. Krajisnik and other top leaders.
"In the war he was second only to Karadzic and shared command over Bosnian military and police," said Paul Risley, the spokesman for Mrs. del Ponte. "The decisions he participated in resulted in the deaths of thousands of Bosnians and in the deportations and ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands."
In Brussels, Lord Robertson, the NATO secretary general, warned other war crimes suspects: "The net is closing. It is time to turn yourselves in."
Although most NATO personnel in Bosnia deliberately avoided encountering indicted individuals until 1997, France held out until recently. This prompted open talk among British and American military officials that France was pro-Serb and that the French sector of Bosnia was a safe haven for indicted Serbs. Of the 18 NATO arrests made since 1997, the French military had arrested only two low-level men, and only in the last three months.
By some accounts here, several recently publicized incidents pointing to cooperation between French and Serbian intelligence may have embarrassed Paris and brought the turnabout that led to the arrest.
Dutch officials also said that Mrs. del Ponte, an experienced and tough prosecutor in Switzerland before joining the tribunal last year, has made it a priority to enlist French cooperation. She has called on several ministers in Paris recently. President Jacques Chirac visited the tribunal here in February while on a state visit to the Netherlands.
"It looks like the French at last may have pulled the plug on wanted Serbs in Bosnia," said one Dutch official. "Some even went skiing in the French sector, but people must be getting quite nervous over there."
