EDITOR’S NOTE: When is Meles Zenawi’s turn? Oh, never mind. Prof. Mesfin Woldemariam said let’s forgive him.
(CNN) — Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been arrested after more than a decade as a fugitive from war crimes charges, the U.N. tribunal that charged him announced Monday.
Radovan Karadzic in 1995.
Karadzic, 63, was the Serb political leader during the 1992-1995 war that followed Bosnia-Herzegovina’s secession from Yugoslavia. He is charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the law of war.
No details of his arrest were immediately available. But the chief prosecutor for the U.N. tribunal, Serge Brammertz, called it “an important day for the victims” and congratulated Serbian authorities for taking him into custody.
“It is also an important day for international justice, because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law and that sooner or later all fugitives will be brought to justice,” Brammertz said.
He said authorities “in due course” will determine when Karadzic is to be transferred to the tribunal at The Hague.
His arrest leaves former Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, as the top-ranking war crimes suspect still at large.
Karadzic, a onetime psychiatrist, declared himself president of a Serb republic within Bosnia after the former Yugoslav republic declared its independence in 1992.
Backed by Serb-led Yugoslav troops, the Bosnian Serbs launched a campaign against the country’s Muslim and Croat population that introduced the world to the term “ethnic cleansing.”
In 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia accused Karadzic and Mladic of leading that campaign, ordering the roundup of thousands of non-Serb civilians into camps where they were killed, tortured or sexually assaulted.
Karadzic is also charged with genocide in connection with the killings of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, the worst European massacre since World War II.