UN/Bosnia: Bosnia's top western envoy, Mr Paddy Ashdown, yesterday sacked 60 Bosnian Serb leaders and officials as punishment for their failure to arrest war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic by the end of June writes Chris Stephen in The Hague
This is the most drastic action yet taken by Western officials against Bosnia's former warring factions since the end of war in 1995, and comes amid fury that Karadzic, the former president charged with genocide, remains on the run.
Those purged, hours ahead of the June 30th arrest deadline, include Mr Dragan Kalinic, the leader of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which Karadzic helped found shortly before the Bosnian war. Kalinic, also the Bosnian Serb parliament speaker, is blamed for refusing to send security forces to arrest Karadzic, and was fired along with Interior Minister Zoran Djeric.
"I decided to remove these people from public and party positions," Mr Ashdown, the High Representative for Bosnia, said. "It was Dragan Kalinic's responsibility as leader of the SDS to prevent fraud, abuse and criminality . . . to ensure that the party founded by Radovan Karadzic was no longer financing him." The purge does not affect the other entity in Bosnia, controlled by the Muslims and Croats, but they could be penalised if NATO, as expected, announces that it is withholding its Partnership for Peace programme from the country.
Ashdown's frustration was matched in The Hague, where prosecutors admitted that the confidence chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte had displayed at the start of the month about the prospect of Karadzic being caught was misplaced.
"We don't have our police, we were expecting that they would give us a result,"said Ms Florence Hartmann, a spokeswoman for Ms Del Ponte.
The continued freedom of Karadzic, the bouffant-haired former poet who led the Bosnian Serbs to war in 1992, is a major embarrassment for the international community.
When the war ended, NATO forces in Bosnia refused to arrest him and he lived openly in a villa 20 minutes from the NATO headquarters. When NATO's policy changed in 1997 and war crimes arrests began, Karadzic vanished. He has been missing ever since.
Several attempts by NATO commandos to snatch him have failed in recent years, and with the NATO force now only 7,000 strong in Bosnia, the chance may have been missed. Karadzic remains popular in his heartland, a band of forests and mountains in eastern and southern Bosnia, and in northern Montenegro where he was born. Ms Hartmann admitted that prosecutors were unsure when Karadzic was in Bosnia and when in Montenegro, and believe he frequently hops over the lightly-guarded border.
She said that at one moment he might be inside Bosnia, but "when I finish my sentence maybe he has crossed back over the border."
In addition to Karadzic, war crimes prosecutors have genocide indictments out against seven more Bosnian Serbs, all of them believed to be hiding in the same piece of terrain as Karadzic.
His non-apprehension has become a key issue because the UN is demanding that the war crimes court, which is also trying former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, must close on schedule in 2008. Hartmann said that unless Karadzic is caught soon, this date may need to be extended.