Bosnian Serb Leader and Top War Crimes Suspect Arrested

Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in the town of Jajce, northwest of Sarajevo, in 1995.

Bosnia’s Serb wartime president, Radovan Karadzic, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals for his part in the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, has been arrested, Serbian President Boris Tadic’s office said on Monday.
Serge Brammertz, the prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, said in a statement late Monday that Mr. Karadzic would be transferred to The Hague, but “the date will be determined in due course.”
Mr. Karadzic’s place of arrest was not announced, but Serbian government officials said Mr. Karadzic had been arrested by the Serbian secret police at a site not far from Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, nearly 13 years after he was first indicted on war crimes.

Radovan Karadzic
Radivoje Pavicic/Associated Press
Radovan Karadzic, the ultranationalist leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-1995 civil war in the former Yugoslavia, is widely regarded by diplomats as the chief architect of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia — crimes that were Europe’s worst atrocities since World War II. One of the world’s most wanted men, he was arrested on July 21, 2008.
Dr. Karadzic, a psychiatrist by profession and a published poet and writer, was twice indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. The charges say he authorized the shooting of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and for directing the slaughter of an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men in Srebenica, in eastern Bosnia.
Regarded as a war hero by many Serbs, he went into hiding in 1997 and escaped capture for years. Officials at the war crimes tribunal say a well-financed support network that included police officers and members of the intelligence services in Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, as well as members of the Serbian Orthodox Church, enabled Dr. Karadzic to remain on the run.

Mr. Karadzic had topped the tribunal’s most-wanted list for more than a decade and was said to have resorted to elaborate disguises to elude authorities. Hague and European Union officials have long suspected that he was hiding in Serbia, and have pressed Belgrade to hand him over.
His reported hide-outs included refurbished caves in the mountains of eastern Bosnia and Serbian orthodox monastaries. Some Serbian newspapers reported that he had eluded arrest for the past 13 years by shaving off his signature mane of wild gray hair and disguising himself in a brown cassock.
The arrest, 11 years after Mr. Karadzic went into hiding, marks the culmination of a long and protracted effort by the west to press Serbia to arrest Mr. Karadzic for what is widely considered among the most heinous crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
It comes just weeks after a new pro-western coalition government in Serbia was formed whose overriding goal is to bring Serbia into the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. The EU has made delivering indicted war criminals to the Hague a precondition for Serbia’s membership.
The arrest was hailed by western diplomats as proof of Serbia’s determination to link itself to the west and put the virulent nationalism of the past behind it. It has particular resonance because the new coalition government is the result of an alliance between the Democrats of President Boris Tadic and the Socialist Party of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, which fought a war against the west in the 1990s, but has now vowed to bring Serbia back into the western fold.
In a sign that the move would accelerate Serbia’s path to the European Union, the EU’s enlargement chief Olli Rehn said Monday that the arrest of the top Bosnian Serb warcrimes fugitive was a “milestone” that would help clear the way for the poor Balkan nation to join the bloc.
“This is certainly a milestone in Serbia’s cooperation with the international criminal tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. It proves the determination of the new government to achieve full cooperation with the tribunal,” he said. He said he and EU foreign ministers would meet with Serbia’s foreign minister Vuk Jeremic at an EU foreign affairs meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss how the EU might accelerate ties with Serbia.
A NATO spokesman described the arrest as “good news for the international community”.
Karadzic’s location has long been a subject of international speculation since he went underground in 1997. The west has long suspected Belgrade of failing to pursue Karadzic, who is believed to have been hiding within Serbia until arrest Monday.
The United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted the former leader on July 24, 1995, just days after thousands of unarmed Bosnian men were executed in and around the Bosnian town of Screbrenica, a UN protected enclave which was overrun by Bosnian Serb military and police. Their forces were assisted closely by Serbian troops sent by Belgrade.
The prosecution charged him with genocide, persecution, deportation and other crimes committed against non-Serb civilians in Bosnia during the 1992-1995 war. He was indicted together with his chief military commander, Bosnian
Serb General Ratko Mladic, who is still on the run and believed to be in Serbia.

Manipulating With the Facts in the War on Iraq

It can not be explained too much, that the Bush Administration is forced to keep their opinion in charge that they stop the insurgence in Iraq effectively with a counter-surge and defeated Al Qaeda, while the Iraqi government is handling the Iranian backed extremists with the help of allied occupiers. And it can not be explained too much that this opinion is as false as the historical facts expose.

What was until the recent changes the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki? The opposition, parties who did not collaborate with the occupier’s troops, was a majority in the parliament. The USA had no other choice than to co-operate with what they left to remain the Iraqi government. The core of the government is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, led by Shiite Ayatollahs, according to the model of Iran and backed by Iran. Also Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself lived in Iran during the reign of Saddam Hoesein later moving to Syria. His Badr militia forces are backed, trained and armed by Iran. Those militia forces were needed during the elections to guarantee the “democratic” support. Most of the political allies of Al-Maliki were in exile in Iran during the Baath-regime.
So, who is backed by Iran, that’s very clear and indisputable.

The other parties were dependent on support of the Iraqi people and that’s why they could not collaborate with the occupiers. Muqtada al-Sadr has the most support of the Arab Shiite people, because he did not go to the Persians in Iran and did not ask or get help from Iran. He has his own militia the Mahdi Army. Than there are also the Sunnis who boycotted the government and the former Baathists who were not involved in the elections. They are in the armed Awakening Forces and this were the forces who could define, find, hunt and defeat the foreign Al Qaeda combatants among the whole of insurgent’s fighters. Third you have the Kurds, most Sunnis and also not backed by the Iranian government, but already strong during the last years of the Baath-regime.
Those who are not backed by Iran, that’s also very clear and indisputable.

The insurgence was in real life a fight of rival tribal and sectarian groups with a lot of bloodshed leading to separation of the different groups. It was always one group against all others and special all groups against the occupiers who could not do very much against it, but shoot violent shooters, moving shadows, kids, and peaceful civilians. Foreign troops also took part in further destructions with air strikes. By the time the separation of different groups was settled and new positions secured there were only the foreign Al Qaeda combatants which maintained terror among all groups of the Iraqi people and only local Sunni fighters could make the distinction between them and former insurgent Iraqi Sunnis. The Americans paid the Awakening Forces ten dollar the man per day to fight Al Qaeda. That was the surge and nothing more than that.

In the meantime the Iranian backed power is no longer Iranian backed.
Almost anybody wants the foreign troops out of their country and no Iranian influence in their place. They are united by that idea and that is the situation by now. It was a concession of Nouri al Maliki after his failed attack on the Mahdi Army and Muqtada al Sadr. It was a concession to save his life and the political existence of his party. They still think different about the future. Al Maliki wants an federal state with borders along tribal and sectarian regions, while Al Sadr and the others opt for an unity-state like during the Baath era. The elections in October will decide the issue. Sunni politicians entered this week the government again to make sure that there will not be an civil war after withdrawal of the foreign troops. Also Awakening Forces are now in the governments army and police, like the Mahdi Army and the Badr Movement infiltrated the army and police forces earlier. Kurds have their own forces in their own territories as before.

There are no Iranian backed extremists or Al Qaeda forces anymore.
Now read the following:

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s appeared to be doing everything he could do this weekend to give his statements advocating a timetable for U.S. troop withdrawal maximum exposure. Just days before Obama’s trip to Iraq, Maliki must have known that the American press would be covering Iraq in greater detail than usual and that the Prime Minister's endorsement of Obama’s plan would work also its way into every article written about Obama’s travel to Afghanistan.

And what follows next:

“Aware of this predicament, the McCain campaign found an ally today: Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Mullen declared when asked about the consequences of a withdrawal within two years that it could be “very dangerous:” “I’d worry about any kind of rapid movement out and creating instability where we have stability.” Desperate to get any support for its candidate’s position, the McCain campaign was quick to blast Mullen’s comments out in a statement:
Today, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s highest ranking officer, made clear that he believes such an approach could be ‘very dangerous.’ Admiral Mullen further added that his view is shared by U.S. commanders in Iraq, who are ‘adamant about continuing progress, about making decisions based on what’s actually happening in the battle space.’ Barack Obama says he wants a ’safe and responsible’ withdrawal from Iraq, but is stubbornly adhering to an unconditional withdrawal that places politics above the advice of our military commanders, the success of our troops, and the security of the American people.
Joe Lieberman also rushed to McCain’s rescue, echoing the talking-point the campaign first responded with yesterday, namely that the success of (McCain’s) surge is the only reason we can even talk of withdrawal today. Lieberman declared today,
If Barack Obama’s policy in Iraq had been implemented, he couldn’t be in Iraq today, is because he was prepared to accept retreat and defeat, and that would mean, today, al Qaeda would be in charge of parts of Iraq, Iranian-backed extremists would be in charge of other parts of Iraq. There’d be civil war and, maybe, even genocide.

You see how politics are manipulated by lying about the facts.
That’s not new in this war.