Book on Karadzic escape BELGRADE (Reuters) – Russia blocked the arrest of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic in 1997 and the United States and Britain persuaded France not to insist on it, according to a new book by a top war crimes official.
Florence Hartmann, former spokeswoman at The Hague war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, recounts how President Bill Clinton, supported by Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Helmut Kohl, persuaded France’s Jacques Chirac not to push the issue. Hartmann says they met in the garden of the Elysee Palace in Paris in May 1997, 17 months after the peace accords which ended the 1992-95 Bosnia war. Chirac was still fuming over the capture of two French pilots who were shot down and held hostage by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995, and wanted to expunge the affront. “Bill Clinton stressed that the operation could not be undertaken without informing the Russians. Chirac was opposed because Moscow had firmly opposed the arrest of Karadzic and would have immediately tipped him off,” Hartmann writes. Karadzic, who was “president” of Bosnia’s rebel Serb Republic during the war, is still at large 11 years later, indicted on two counts of genocide for the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims and Croats. “Clinton insisted, supported by Blair. Chirac ended up by conceding the issue,” writes Hartmann in “Peace and Punishment,” excerpted by the Paris daily Le Monde. “Karadzic was not arrested because of Russian opposition,” she quotes Chirac as telling Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte. “Boris Yeltsin told me: Karadzic knows too much about (then Yugoslav president Slobodan) Milosevic. He warned me he would send a plane to get him out of Bosnia if necessary, but he would never permit the arrest of Karadzic,” Chirac is quoted as saying. In November 1997, as NATO-patrolled Bosnia was about to hold a post-war election, a Russian plane whisked Karadzic off to Belarus for several months to keep him out of danger. http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_world_115987_08/09/2007_87574
