Reports in The Daily Telegraph and Reuters record an apparent new determination to arrest Hague fugitives, headed by Mladic and Karadzic, on the part of Eufor which has just replaced Nato in B-H

The British general in charge of the European Union's military force in Bosnia yesterday promised a widescale assault on fugitive war criminals and the Mafia networks supporting them, after the decade-long failure by US-led peacekeepers to arrest those indicted on genocide charges.

In an interview at his headquarters outside Sarajevo, Maj Gen David Leakey said troops under his command would ‘break some bones’ in the pursuit of those on their wanted list, including the Bosnian Serbs, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, sought for the extermination of thousands during Bosnia's civil war.

While praising the peacekeeping efforts of the Nato's SFOR, which his force replaced last month, Maj Gen Leakey said it had only scratched the surface of groups the war criminals rely on for shelter and finance.

He said: ‘SFOR made pinpricks across the map, which might have hurt but had very little lasting impact. We want to tackle these networks on an industrial scale. We don't just want to scratch them. We are going to break some bones.’

His force, Eufor, was planning operations to hit the support networks that have financed and housed fugitive war criminals. Besides keeping the lid on ethnic tensions, he would deploy up to 2,000 soldiers at a time in operations to catch Bosnia's most wanted, he continued.

The general gave an early sign of his intentions two weeks after taking command of Eufor in December.

At dawn across Bosnia, more than 1,000 Eufor troops raided military installations which intelligence sources had pinpointed as potential hideouts for war criminals.

At one vast Cold War era military bunker north-east of Sarajevo, more than 250 troops surrounded the village of Han Pijesak, as helicopters hovered overhead. Explosive specialists and dog handlers moved in as troops cut off every exit to the ‘Villa Javor’ hunting lodge.

The Villa Javor appears to offer a humble home only to its guard dog. But in its garage, an unprepossessing metal door leads to a huge nuclear bunker gouged out of the mountainside, a bastion of the Bosnian Serb army.

So far, 119 military sites like Han Pijesak have been raided since Eufor took control in Bosnia.

‘Why didn't SFOR do this?’ asked Maj Gen Leakey. ‘Well it might look like hard work. It is hard work. But at Eufor we will do that hard work. We took a different view on this to SFOR. In diplomatic language it was a calling card. A sign that Eufor is a military force to be reckoned with,’ he added. ‘This was an eye-catching operation. But for its targets it was eye-watering.’

To enter the Han Pijesak bunker is to enter a complex capable of shielding its inhabitants from any assault - be it a nuclear bomb, or Nato forces after war crimes fugitives.

Behind blast doors and walls several feet thick, tunnels lead hundreds of yards into the rock. Fresh water supplies and air filtration systems provide protection against radiation from a Third World War. Further along is a command centre, with detailed maps of the region. Its equipment is a functioning, if outdated, testament to the bunker's original purpose as part of Tito's Yugoslav military machine.

But recently the facilities at Han Pijesak, its isolation, and its control by the Bosnian Serb military - where Mladic is still seen by some as a hero - have given it new purpose. Outside the Bosnian Serb army, Gen Mladic will always be linked with the greatest single act of barbarism in post-Second World War Europe, the slaughter of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by troops under his command in 1995.

At the heart of the Han Pijesak bunker lie spartan quarters with pictures, as well as a mirror, on the walls. Outside the bedroom, with its double bed, is a cot for the VIP's personal bodyguard.

This report appeared in The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2005

*****

EU force vows to get tough on Bosnia war criminals

Reuters, London

The British general in charge of the new EU peacekeeping force in Bosnia vowed on Saturday he would get tough to hunt down fugitive war criminals and smash Mafia-style networks supporting them.

‘We are going to break some bones,’ Major General David Leakey, who commands some 7,000 troops in his European Union force, told the Daily Telegraph in an interview.

Leakey's troops took over last month from a NATO-led force that was unable over nearly a decade to track down the two most wanted, Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, as well as other fugitives.

He praised the peacekeeping efforts of the NATO-led SFOR force but said it had only scratched the surface of groups that war criminals relied on for shelter and finance to evade the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

‘SFOR made pinpricks across the map, which might have hurt but had very little lasting impact,’ said Leakey.

‘We want to tackle these networks on an industrial scale. We don't just want to scratch them.’

The Daily Telegraph said Leakey's EUFOR force was planning operations to hit support networks that had financed and housed fugitive war criminals. Leakey would deploy up to 2,000 troops at a time in missions to catch the most wanted, said the newspaper.

Bosnia's 1992-95 conflict, pitting Serbs, Croats and Muslims against each other, was one of several Balkan wars in the 1990s in which the Yugoslav federation collapsed.

The 1995 Dayton peace agreement divided post-war Bosnia into two highly autonomous regions -- a Muslim-Croat federation and a Serb republic -- under a loose umbrella central government.

Both regions are obliged to cooperate with the U.N. war crimes tribunal, but the Serb entity has not arrested a single fugitive since the war ended.

The West has made clear to the Bosnian Serbs that their poor cooperation with the international community in the hunt for Karadzic, Mladic and other fugitives is the greatest obstacle to Bosnia's integration with the EU and NATO.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted for the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and a long and deadly siege of Sarajevo.

This report was issue

Search our archives: