Karadzic Arrested

And it's about time, too.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of massacres making him one of the world's top war crimes fugitives, was arrested Monday evening in a raid that ended a near 13-year manhunt, the country's president and the U.N. tribunal said.

Karadzic is the suspected mastermind of mass killings that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history." They include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, Europe's worst slaughter since World War II.

"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade. It is also an important day for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that nobody is beyond the reach of the law," said Serge Brammertz, the tribunal's head prosecutor.

President Boris Tadic's office said Karadzic has been taken before the investigative judge of Serbia's war crimes court _ a legal procedure that indicates he could soon be extradited to the U.N. court at The Hague, Netherlands.

If Karadzic is transferred to there, he would be the 44th Serb suspect extradited to the tribunal. The others include former President Slobodan Milosevic, who was ousted in 2000 and died in 2006 while on trial on war crimes charges.

Something about capturing, trying, and carrying out sentence on war criminals makes me smile. Don't know why...

UPDATE: Let's not forget that Ratko Mladic is still out there:

Prosecutors in The Hague and officials of the European Union have long suspected that he was, in fact, hiding in Serbia, and in recent years have pressed officials in Belgrade to hand him over. The failure to arrest Mr. Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the still fugitive Bosnian Serb general also indicted on war crimes, has stood as a block to greater Serbian ties to the European Union after the wars in Bosnia and later Kosovo.

“This is a historic event,” said Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the agreements in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia in 1995. “Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the worst. The reason was that Karadzic was a real racist believer. Karadzic really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milosevic was an opportunist.”

--WS

A Moderate Form of Islam Does Exist

Michael Totten gives us an invaluable look at how moderate Islam does exist, and I do believe that not enough attention is paid to this fact:

I’m accustomed to spending quality time in moderate Islamic environments. I lived in the most liberal and cosmopolitan Sunni neighborhood in Beirut next to the American University, and I’ve vacationed with my wife in famously moderate Muslim countries like Tunisia and Turkey. Kosovo surprised even me and forced me to redefine my very conception of what a moderate Muslim even is. Kosovo is so thoroughly modern and secularized that if it weren’t for the mosques on the skyline there would be no visible evidence that Kosovo is a Muslim-majority country at all. Kosovo looks no more religious than France.

The fact that Kosovo even exists is because we were finally forced to step up and do something about the Milosevic regime. I have to give credit to President Bush for not following through on what he intimated in the 2000 campaign and withdrawing from the Balkans. I have to say, also, that John McCain was virtually alone in the Republican caucus for supporting Bill Clinton's intervention in the region, even if it was a bit half-hearted. The problem is, the foreign policy decisions made by Bush and McCain are overwhelmingly in the category of disastrous and counterproductive; with regards to Kosovo, we see a glimmer of something positive. If only they were able to think more clearly, right?

Mr. Totten talks about how the bin Laden influence came to the region in the 1990s:

Around a thousand mujahideen, veteran Arabic fighters from the anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan, showed up in Bosnia in the mid-1990s to fight a jihad against Serbian Orthodox Christians. They thought they would be welcomed, and they were right. The European community imposed an arms embargo on all of Yugoslavia during the Bosnian civil war which preserved the imbalance of power and arms in favor of Slobodan Milosevic and his nationalist Bosnian Serb comrades in arms. The Bosnian army was multi-ethnic and multi-confessional – it included Serb and Croat Christians as well as Bosniak Muslims – but its leaders chose to accept help from the so-called “Afghan Arabs” because they were desperate.

I don't know how many people are aware of this, but in the hours after the attacks on September 11, 2001, US troops based in the former Yugoslavia went into action almost right away and rounded up as many of these mujahideen as they could. The locals pointed out where they were and members of the 29th Infantry Division, a National Guard unit based on the East Coast, which had sent troops to the region, went into action. They surrounded homes, kicked in doors, and put them into detention before the smoke cleared over Manhattan. I know this because a senior NCO from that unit told me how the raids were carried out--the mujahideen were shocked and surprised and made little or no effort to escape. No one expected the Americans to move so quickly. The 9/11 attacks had caught them flat footed. Thus, the first strike against bin Laden after 9/11 was carried out by citizen soldiers who had been deployed overseas to help protect Muslims from being slaughtered. The irony is they were arresting mujahideen were there do so the exact same thing.

--WS

One more down, three still to go

Thirteen years after the end of the war in Bosnia, one of the top four Bosnian Serb officers wanted for war crimes and genocide has been arrested in Belgrade and will be extradited to The Hague to stand trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

Stojan Zupljanin was the police commander in Banja Luca, and in that capacity he had operational control over the detention camps where Bosnian Muslims were held in horrific conditions, and thousands upon thousands of people were murdered because of their ethnicity. He is also accused of wiping out entire communities of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the Krajina area.

"Stojan Zupljanin was arrested today near Belgrade ... police and security agents took part in the operation. He should be extradited to the Hague in the next 72 hours," said Bruno Vekaric, spokesman for Serbia's special war crimes prosecutor's office.

He said Zupljanin, 56, was found at an apartment about 8 km (5 miles) from the centre of Belgrade and would be taken before an investigative judge at the war crimes court in Belgrade before being extradited.

"There was no resistance during his arrest," said Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia's chief war crimes prosecutor, who coordinated the operation.

"This arrest shows clearly that we are seriously cooperating (with the Hague) and there is the political will for full cooperation."

He said a previous attempt to arrest Zupljanin in the southern Serbian city of Nis, had failed and the suspect escaped. He did not say when this took place.

A spokeswoman for the prosecution at the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague also confirmed his arrest.

Zupljanin, a commander in the city of Banja Luka during the 1992-95 Bosnia war, is charged with killing Muslim and Croat civilians.

The arrest of Zupljanin is welcome news indeed - but still at large are Ratco Mladic, Goran Hadzic, and Radovan Karadzic. The arrest of these three men remains a huge stumbling block between Serbia and an invitation to join the European Union.

"Cooperating with The Hague is a precondition for Serbia to begin its EU integration," said political analyst Marko Blagojevic of the independent Centre for Free Election and Democracy. "This is a step forward for Serbia."