U.S. troops nab Bosnian Serb wanted for crimes

PARIS - U.S. troops yesterday arrested a Bosnian Serb general who allegedly played a key role in the deadliest massacre of Muslim civilians of the Bosnian war and dispatched him to the Netherlands to stand trial for genocide.

Gen. Radislav Krstic is the highest-ranking war crimes suspect to be taken into custody at The Hague, seat of the U.N. tribunal prosecuting war crimes and genocide in the bitter 1991-95 conflicts that pitted Serbs, Croats and Muslims against one another in breakaway republics of a disintegrating Yugoslavia.

In its indictment, the tribunal charges that Krstic was responsible for genocide during the latter half of 1995 when the Bosnian Serb army's Drina corps, under his command, overran the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica - which had been declared a U.N. "safe area."

The Dutch troops charged with the town's security were unable or - as critics in the Netherlands and elsewhere have said - unwilling to stop the Bosnian Serb rampage. It is estimated that as many as 8,000 Muslim civilians were driven from Srebrenica into the mountains, fleeing toward the town of Tuzla. Along the way, the indictment charges, they were ambushed and either killed by Serb troops or rounded up for subsequent execution.

Until his capture by American units of the NATO-led Stabilization Force in northeastern Bosnia, Krstic's indictment by the tribunal had been a closely guarded secret, one of an unknown number of arrest warrants kept under seal to enhance the prospect of apprehension. Krstic's sealed indictment was barely a month old.

The chief prosecutor in The Hague, Louise Arbour, yesterday described Krstic's arrest as "very significant for the continuing work of the tribunal," which has been attacked for prosecuting suspects much further down the chain of command.

Nearly a score of indictments of low-ranking officers or soldiers have been dropped in the last year to refocus the cash-strapped, slow-moving tribunal's work on more significant wartime decision makers such as Krstic, who served just under the Bosnian Serb military chief, Ratko Mladic.

In a statement yesterday, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana warned the 29 publicly indicted suspects still at large "to surrender immediately" to the tribunal. "They, too, will be brought to justice," Solana said.

The two most-wanted Bosnian Serbs are Mladic and former political leader Radovan Karadzic. Their whereabouts are no secret to NATO forces who are monitoring the peace in Bosnia and who have multiple mandates to arrest all suspects wanted in The Hague.

In addition to genocide charges, Krstic faces five counts, including complicity to commit genocide, extermination, murder and persecution.

The arduous work of exhuming graves in the Srebrenica area during the past two years has uncovered what the tribunal believes is strong evidence of deliberate killings of Muslims, including victims blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, dead from single bullet wounds to the head. The exhumations, a tribunal source said yesterday, also revealed systematic reburial of victims in an effort to disguise where and how they died.

Krstic will join 26 others in a special tribunal jail facility at Scheveningen, near the Dutch seat of government. A tribunal source said he will make his initial appearance on Monday before the panel, the equivalent of an arraignment.

In the tribunal's five years of existence, only four cases have come to a conclusion. Three trials are underway, and seven more are in the pretrial phase.

12-03-98