NEW YORK – A multinational commando formed by special American, French, British and Dutch forces has been practicing for weeks for the capture of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb chief who is to be tried in the Hague, together with General Ratko Mladic, for genocide and war crimes. For the moment Karadzic has lost track of him. It is no longer in the ex-stronghold of Pale, in the mountains behind Sarajevo. There are those who say that he hides in Montenegro, or in Belgrade, or even abroad. Quoting sources from the French secret services, Le Monde argues that he would be willing to settle and would have commissioned two American lawyers to negotiate the conditions: in particular he would like to serve his sentence in a religiously related country with his own Christian Orthodox faith. Among all these mysteries, however, there is one thing to be sure: the circle around Karadzic is closing, the protagonist of the war in Bosnia and dozens of massacres has counted hours, the United States, which have closed an eye so far, fearing that his capture could result in a bloodbath, they lost patience. For Washington the change of course towards the Serb-Bosnian leader coincides with a new policy on war criminals. In practice, the Americans have opened the hunt for all the Hitler at the end of the millennium. During his stay in Rwanda, during the African voyage at the end of March, Bill Clinton apologized for his lack of American commitment to punish those responsible for the genocide. And it is yesterday’s news, published in the New York Times and confirmed by the White House, that the president has ordered to capture Pol Pot, the chief of the Khmer Rouge who in the seventies colored the Cambodian rice fields by killing two million fellow citizens . After being removed from the Vietnamese army in 1979 and forced to take refuge in the jungle with his guerrillas, Pol Pot, who is 73, was deposed by his family last year and sentenced to house arrest. Now he lives on the border with Thailand.
And it is there that Clinton would like to have him arrested, then transferred to the Hague and subjected to an international trial. The American plan, however, needs the political and military cooperation of the Thais: who beat up not to bump into China, the historical ally of the Khmer Rouge (it seems that Bangkok was to give the Times the tip to make it less secret, and therefore more difficult, the capture). On the other hand, the Pol Pot operation appears much easier than the Karadzic operation. According to the commanders of the Sfor, that is the NATO mission in Bosnia, it takes eight hundred rambo, supported by helicopters and armored vehicles, to ensure the arrest of the warlord, who can still count on four hundred armed guards to the teeth. Not only that: the anti-Karadzic attack, again according to the calculations of the generals, would cost NATO from twenty to forty dead. Precisely for this high cost so high in human lives, Washington and the other western capitals have delayed the operation, preferring to make scorched earth around the ex-leader and arresting minor criminals, like Miroslav Kvoca and Mladen Radic, who own the other yesterday they were taken into custody by international troops, awaiting the transfer to the Hague. Sniffing the new American intransigence, feeling now hunted, Karadzic has hired, probably with the gains made at the time of the black market, two American lawyers. And they would be the ones conducting the negotiations for a surrender, which could take place in the next days or weeks. According to French sources, its objective would be to set certain conditions in terms of procedural defense and methods of detention