Dragan Obrenovic to be transferred to CTFY

By Vaiju Naravane

PARIS, APRIL 18. NATO officials have said that Dragan Obrenovic, the Bosnian Serb arrested on Sunday for war crimes committed in the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, will be transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia (CTFY) at The Hague in the Netherlands during the course of the week.

The NATO General Secretary, Lord George Robertson, said in a statement on Tuesday: ``He is accused of being responsible for the extermination of thousands of Bosnian Muslim males, complicity of genocide, violation of the laws and customs of war, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, including murder, torture and racial and religious persecutions.''

Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia was a designated safe haven protected by the United Nations from 1992 to 1995 during the Bosnian war. But Serb forces stormed the town, killing over 7500 Muslim and Croat males, expelling the rest of the population and carrying out mass rape.

Obrenovic was arrested on a sealed indictment for crimes he is alleged to have committed between July and November 1995.

In Washington, the White House Press Secretary, Mr. Ari Fleischer, praised Obrenovic's arrest saying that the 1995 attack on Srebrenica represented ``one of the darkest episodes in the recent tragedy that befell Bosnia.'' He said blame should also be borne by Radovan Karazdic, the Bosnian Serb political leader during the war and the Bosnian Serb supreme military commander, General Ratko Mladic.

Last week Radovan Karazdic vowed he would never go to prison. ``I would surrender immediately if I knew my surrender would benefit the Serbian people. But it would be absurd to surrender to those who have killed Serb children and the elderly. And it would be stupid to believe that the tribunal would be unbiased,'' he said in his first public statement since he was indicted several years ago.

In Bosnia, there is simmering anger at the fact that Karazdic and Mladic whose whereabouts are known to NATO forces operating in Bosnia should go scot free while several minor figures have been arrested. NATO says it cannot carry out the arrests because it is not willing to sacrifice the lives of its soldiers since any attempt to arrest the two men will inevitably lead to armed aggression on the part of their supporters.

But pressure to arrest them is growing. The chief war crimes prosecutor, Ms. Carla Del Ponte, said recently during a visit to Bosnia that she wanted the arrest of all 38 persons indicted by the court and who are still at large.

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Section  : International
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