Despite a 12-year massive international manhunt, a mouth-watering bounty and intensive intelligence gathering, the architect of the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the 1990s, Radovan Karadzic, remains at large. “They are the bone in my throat,” Carla Del Ponte, who steps down at the end of the year as chief prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague, told the Guardian on December 2, referring to Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic.
“To one side, I can look at everything this tribunal has done, and it has been hugely important, to establish that these crimes were committed and give voice to the victims,” she said.
“Then I can look the other way and have Karadzic and Mladic, wanted for ordering those very crimes, and for genocide at Srebrenica, still at large, after 12 years of indictment and my eight years here: then I feel terrible disappointment.”
Karadzic and Mladic had been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal for genocide and war crimes, including mass rape and concentration camps, against thousands of innocent Bosnian Muslims and Croats in 1992. Karadzic’s “ethnic cleansing,” a term invented by Karadzic himself, continued for three years and culminated in the slaying in Srebrenica of 8,000 men and boys over five days in 1995.
An international coalition led by the United States army eventually intervened and brought an end to the nightmare after more than 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. Both Mladic and Karadzic are still at large despite a massive manhunt and a US bounty of $5 million for any information leading to the latter.
Karadzic’s elusive capture and the myths surrounding the man have turned into a Hollywood movie, The Hunting Party, starring Richard Gere.