Bosnia’s international governor, Paddy Ashdown, on Thursday launched a crackdown on corrupt officials whom he has accused of deliberately failing to capture Europe’s most-wanted war criminals.
Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader whose position of high representative of Bosnia gives him sweeping powers, said Bosnian Serb ”obstructionists” are willingly sheltering those wanted by the Hague tribunal.
He said unless authorities in the Republica Srpska — the Serb-run half of Bosnia Herzegovina — take dramatic steps, progress for the nation as a whole will be blocked.
On Thursday, he stepped up his campaign against the Serb authorities by sacking nine — including senior security officials — and freezing bank accounts.
The move followed a similar purge in July when 60 officials — including the Serbian Democratic party leader and speaker of the Bosnian Serb Parliament, Dragan Kalinic, and the Bosnian Serb police chief, Zoran Djeric — were dismissed.
Ashdown said he has evidence one of the most-wanted war criminals, ex-Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, has been sheltered by old army colleagues.
He revealed that Mladic, indicted for genocide including the 1995 massacre of 8 000 Muslim men in Srebrenica, was seen as recently as June 28 at the huge Han-Pijesak military compound, only an hour from Sarajevo.
He said Mladic, who has been on the run since 1997, was on the Bosnian Serb army’s payroll until recently.
Another Hague indictee, Gojko Jankovic, has been seen freely walking around another Serb-run town, feeling sufficiently relaxed to appear at a public funeral, he said.
In an interview with The Guardian and other papers at his headquarters in Sarajevo, during an European Union-sponsored trip to Bosnia, Ashdown said: ”There have been 20 war criminals arrested on the territory of Republica Srpska — all of them by Nato.
”No one can tell me [Republica Srpska’s] failure to capture a single war criminal in nine years is anything other than a deep-laid intention not to capture them and by having institutions which are corrupted in the process.
”There are some signs that there is a change of attitude. But no one is going to be satisfied by words. These guys have got to be captured and taken to The Hague, and until they are, there is an absolute block on this country moving forward — either to Nato or the EU.
”If the question is: ‘Is the whole of the country being held to ransom by the failure of the RS?’, the answer is yes.”
He said only by being accepted into the Nato fold and moving towards EU membership can Bosnia’s future be guaranteed.
”You cannot have a future unless you have justice. If you want to have peace in a country like this, you have to have justice. That is not to say every single war criminal has to be hunted down, everyone of 5 000 or however many there are supposed to be. There is a moment at which we will have to move from retribution to reconciliation. But first of all we have to have justice.
”If you cannot have the architects of those appalling crimes brought to justice, you cannot have … lasting peace.”
He defended the slow pace of change in Bosnia, which is stricken by high unemployment, organised crime and a deteriorating infrastructure.
”If I was living in [Bosnia] I would want to see things move faster. This has been a terrible period for them. They are still living in a period of shock after the war, their economy is wrecked, their judges were until we reformed them totally corrupt, even now there is corruption up to the highest level …
”I am deeply impatient about the pace of change. But if you look at this in comparison to any other peacekeeping operation, I can not think of a single one in the whole of history, except for East Timor, where we have moved so far from war to peace.
”Far from getting nowhere in nine years — nine brief years after one of the worst wars, post-World War II, in which a 16th of the population, 250 000, were killed and [two million] driven from their homes — this place is a miracle.”
EU troops in Eufor, who took over the Bosnia peacekeeping mission from Nato this month, raided the bunker system on Thursday as part of an ”inspection programme”. — Guardian Unlimited Â