Muslim minister in Serbia says NATO gave Karadzic immunity deal

[Crvena zvezda]

Karadzic negotiated impunity deal: Serb minister
Web posted at: 9/20/2007 3:29:15
Source ::: AFP

BELGRADE • A Serbian minister said yesterday he was convinced that Bosnian Serb genocide suspect Radovan Karadzic was involved in talks with the West to secure his impunity from trial.
Rasim Ljajic, the minister in charge of cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal, told radio B92 he was “convinced that negotiations took place” but uncertain whether a deal was signed.
“A few months ago, I didn’t believe that such an agreement existed, but now I must acknowledge that something happened at the time,” said Ljajic.
The minister said his comment was based on accounts by certain witnesses who had made the same statements even though they had been questioned separately.
Ljajic added there was nothing to confirm the existence of an agreement which, according to various sources, Karadzic signed ensuring his safety in exchange for his withdrawal from public life after the 1995 Dayton peace accords ended Bosnia’s war.
“Certain witnesses affirmed that such a document existed at the ministry of foreign affairs, but we didn’t find it there,” said Ljajic.
Ljajic said two more witnesses were soon to give evidence before Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor.
The prosecutor’s office would not confirm or deny the minister’s comments.
In a recently released book, Florence Hartmann, the former spokeswoman for UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, said she was convinced Washington had negotiated a deal with Karadzic ahead of the Dayton talks.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) charged Karadzic and his wartime general Ratko Mladic with genocide and crimes against humanity in 1995.
The pair remain the two most-wanted men in Europe, and, while some details have since emerged about Mladic’s movements up until 2005, little is known about Karadzic’s whereabouts.
“He has disappeared from the radar screen,” Del Ponte said in June. “I know he’s around, because he comes up with books and poetry, he still produces his literature, but no one seems to be looking for him anymore.”
In a separate development, Karadzic’s son was detained in Bosnia after being expelled from Serbia, police said yesterday.
Bosnian Serb police stopped Sasa Karadzic late Tuesday at a border crossing as he entered the country from Serbia in order to check his documents. He was released after midnight.
Police in Belgrade had detained him five days ago “for an identity check” and seized his out-of-date ID card before ordering him to leave Serbia and not return for at least one year.
“Karadzic crossed the border from Serbia with a travel permit, and now he will have to take out new documents” for Bosnia, police official Gojko Vasic said.
Radovan Karadzic’s two children live in Pale, the Bosnian Serb wartime stronghold near Sarajevo. Sasa had been in Belgrade to visit his own five-year-old son, who was recovering from surgery. Besides Karadzic and Mladic, two more suspects remain at large: former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic and Stojan Zupljanin, a Bosnian Serb wartime police commander, both believed to be hiding in Serbia.