Bosnia's international governor, Paddy Ashdown, on Thursday launched a new crackdown on corrupt officials whom he has accused of deliberately failing to capture Europe's most wanted war criminals.
Ashdown, whose position of high representative of Bosnia gives him sweeping powers, said Bosnian Serb "obstructionists" were 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 then progress for the nation as a whole would be blocked.
Yesterday he stepped up his campaign against the Serb authorities by sacking nine people, 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 had evidence one of the most wanted war criminals, ex-Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, had been sheltered by old army colleagues.
He revealed that Mladic, indicted for genocide including the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica, had been 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, had also been 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 a press interview at his headquarters in Sarajevo, part of an EU-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," he said.
"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," he said.
"If the question is: `Is the whole of the country being held to ransom by the failure of the RS?' The answer is yes," Ashdown said.
He said only by being accepted into the NATO fold and moving towards EU membership could Bosnia's future be guaranteed.
Meanwhile, the US on Thursday signaled a stepped-up and concerted drive to isolate Bosnian war crimes suspects.
The US Treasury announced it had frozen the US-based assets of the Serb Democratic Party, two companies and suspects, while the State Department reiterated the need for a "special effort" to strip the Bosnian fugitives of their support.
"Today is a further example of how we can closely work together and try to obtain a goal that we are all intent on reaching," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said of the multi-pronged drive to corner Karadzic, Mladic and other wanted Bosnians.
Boucher said that US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who visited Bosnia in July, had called for a "special effort to identify the location of the fugitives from the court in The Hague and to do everything we could" to capture them.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
INFLUTENTIAL THEORIST: Habermas was particularly critical of the ‘limited interest’ shown by German politicians in ‘shaping a politically effective Europe Jurgen Habermas, whose work on communication, rationality and sociology made him one of the world’s most influential philosophers and a key intellectual figure in his native Germany, has died. He was 96. Habermas’ publisher, Suhrkamp, said he died on Saturday in Starnberg, near Munich. Habermas frequently weighed in on political matters over several decades. His extensive writing crossed the boundaries of academic and philosophical disciplines, providing a vision of modern society and social interaction. His best-known works included the two-volume Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas, who was 15 at the time of Nazi Germany’s defeat, later recalled the dawn of
RSS