Karadzic, Rwanda: Bad Times Remembered
- August 6th, 2008
- Posted by EUEditor
New efforts are made to bring to justice, men wanted for mass murder in Bosnia; and an inquiry in Rwanda, into that country’s genocide, points a finger of blame at France.
PRESSURE ON SERB FUGITIVES TO TURN THEMSELVES IN
The Serbian government has called on the two fugitives from the civil war still at large, Goran Hadzic and Ratko Mladic, to surrender to justice.
At the time of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, Hadzic was the leader of Croatian Serbs, and Mladic the commander of Bosnian Serb forces implicated in the mass murder of civilians at the town of Srebrenica.
They’re both wanted by the United Nations on war crimes charges.
Last month (21.7.08) Serb authorities announced the capture of Radovan Karadzic, who’d been President of the break-away wartime “Republic of Srpskaâ€, within Bosnia.
He has been sent to the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, at The Hague, to face trial for crimes including genocide, at the time of the siege of Sarajevo, and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre – in which some 8000 men and boys were killed.
On the run since 1996, the former psychiatrist and poet, 63, was found in Belgrade, famously bearded with long white hair; he’d been practising alternative medicine.
The Serbian Defence Minister, Dragan Sutanovac, and the government he serves, wants his country in the European Union, while EU leaders make plain in Brussels that as a first condition, Hadzic and Mladic should be brought in.
He told a newspaper interviewer the country was being “held to ransom†by the pair.
RWANDA ACCUSES
A commission of inquiry in Rwanda has accused the French government of complicity in the killing of some 800000 people there in 1994.
It said political leaders in Paris knew about preparations for the act of genocide; France had been training militia forces from the Hutu ethnic community; and
it had troops active in the area while the massacre was happening, and as many of the perpetrators were escaping from the country.
It named leaders from both sides of politics in the former colonial power, including the late President Francois Mitterrand and three former Prime Ministers: Edouard Balladur, Alain Juppe and Dominique de Villepin.
A previous French inquiry discounted such links to the genocide, perpetrated against minority Tutsi people, and also many Hutus.
Officials in Paris said (6.8.08) they would comment after reading the full document from Rwanda.
Reference:
BBC, “Serbia Urges Miladic To Surrender”, www.bbc.com, (6.6.08)
Picture: Forensic work at Srebrenica massacre site, zokster.net