Goran Hadzic

"Landep News"

Goran Hadzic

Serbian authorities announced on Wednesday that they arrested the last fugitive war criminal, Goran Hadzic, sought by the U.N. war crimes court.

Goran Hadzic was a leader of the Serbs in Croatia, and is wanted by the international court for crimes committed between 1991-1995, when he fought against the independence of Croatia from Yugoslavia.

He has been able to avoid capture, being on the run for eight years, but the security forces of Serbia succeeded in apprehending him in the mountain region of the northern part of the country.

The capture was announced on television, but it is said that formal confirmation of it would be made later on Wednesday by the president Boris Tadic, in a press conference.

Officials at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said they could not confirm or deny yet the news of Goran Hadzic’s arrest. NATO is also waiting for the arrest to be confirmed.

If the news is confirmed, it is likely that the European Union officials will make a comment on how this event will affect the future of the country that has been kept for more than a decade under constant pressure to turn over to the international court those who fought the wars in the 1990s.

Hadzic was indicted in 2004 with a large range of crimes, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, persecutions on political, religious and racial grounds, torture, murder, extermination, forcible movement and deportation, and unjustified destruction.

It is alleged that the crimes he stands accused of were committed to the purpose of driving the non-Serbs out of the territories controlled by Serbs in Croatia. The war in Croatia lasted until 1995 and claimed the lives of 10,000 people.

He escaped arrest because of the help he received from the Serbian security, which has been for years accused of harboring fugitives.

Former Yugoslavia

In 2001, Serbia handed over to the ICTY the president Slobodan Milosevic, who died in prison in 2006.

Then, in 2008, Radovan Karadzic, the former president of the Srpska Republic in Bosnia Herzegovina was sent to the ICTY, after 12 years of escaping arrest.

Two months ago, Ratko Mladic, the general who is considered responsible for the massacre in Srebrenica, in 1995, was also deferred to the international court.

Of all the countries that once composed Yugoslavia, Slovenja is the only one who was admitted as full member of the EU, because of the lack of war crimes committed on its territory, and the reforms that were made soon after the separation.

Croatia is still waiting its turn, being rejected for its own war criminals and for the nationalistic regime that dominated the country for many years after the war.

Serbia was the most prejudiced by the war, in spite of the fact that most of the war criminals ICTY is looking for are of Serbian descent.

It lost territories and infrastructure, especially after the bombardments executed in 1999, including on Eastern Orthodox Easter day, against the capital and other infrastructure targets.

In the breakaway region of Kosovo, which proclaimed itself independence from Serbia and became a bridgehead for terrorism, drug deals and all sorts of crimes in the book, the Serbian cultural heritage was destroyed, the churches defiled on sectarian grounds, the monasteries bombed to dust, and their people living in constant fear.

Kosovo is considered by Serbs the cradle of their civilization, and was populated with Albanians in the days of President Tito, who gave the Albanian neighbors a chance to escape the criminal regime of Enver Hoxha, and gave himself a possibility to play a role in the politics of the region.

Now Serbia is looking for membership of EU, in hopes to turn a very bloody and painful page in its national history.

A decade after the conflicts that shook up the entire Balkans, and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, the nations of former Yugoslavia foud ways to communicate with one another and reinstate former economic and political ties that had made Yugoslavia the least Communist country of them all.

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