Arresting Karadzic and Mladic

Madam, - It's good to see Paddy Ashdown taking some decisive action by sacking those responsible for failing (despite a US0-sponsored…

Madam, - It's good to see Paddy Ashdown taking some decisive action by sacking those responsible for failing (despite a US0-sponsored reward of $5 million) to arrest alleged Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic (July 1st).

Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, both in hiding for the past seven years, are two of the world's most wanted men. The UN war crimes tribunal has indicted them for, inter alia, the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of some 6,000 of Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995, during the 1992-95 war of the Yugoslav succession which killed over 200,000 people.

Many people bemoan the failure of NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) to catch these men and put them on trial in The Hague, to join their erstwhile colleague Slobodan Milosevic. However, the indictment process itself wreaks terrible retribution on the indictee.

Think about it from Karadzic's own point of view, for example. His movements are extremely constrained. Not only dare he not stray beyond Bosnia or perhaps Montenegro, but even within these relative safe havens he cannot move without extreme caution and surrounded by up to 80 body guards. The Bosnian capital Pale, pretty dismal at the best of times and still not recovered from the war, must be a pretty boring place to be stuck in, virtually forever. For the man will see no end in sight, but constant hiding and harassment.

READ MORE

Though he has squirreled away ill-gotten millions, there will be no sunny holidays for him, no shopping trips to Harrods, no celebrity blondes on his arm, no Caribbean cruises with his grandchildren, no meals in world-class restaurants, no ringside (or any) seats at international concerts and events, no meetings with the great and the good. Just Pale.

And it is a lifetime sentence. All his money is good for is paying his army of personal bodyguards. And one day - perhaps in 10 or 25 years time - the money will have disappeared and therefore so will the bodyguards.

Yet the risk of arrest will persist.

Think about how the indictment process ruined the retirements of General Pinochet of Chile and Idi Amin of Uganda to name just two others.

And here's the thing. These ghastly people have, effectively, been charged, tried, found guilty and then sentenced to these miserable life-long punishments. This has all been done, in absentia, via the presentation of unchallenged evidence to a faceless committee operating behind closed doors, and without the defendants ever having the chance to put up a defence.

Their only way out, if you can call it that, is to present themselves for trial to the tribunal that has indicted them and hope that the terms of their imprisonment are shorter than the lifetime sentences they are otherwise serving.

So do not think that Radovan Karadzic and his ilk are "getting away with murder". They are certainly undergoing very lengthy, bitter punishments. -Yours, etc.,

TONY ALLWRIGHT, Killiney, Co Dublin.