Last Balkan war crimes fugitive arrested

SERBIA HAS arrested the last fugitive wanted by the United Nations war crimes court at The Hague, removing a major obstacle to the country’s bid to join the European Union.

Goran Hadzic was found in the Fruska Gora national park in northeastern Serbia, near the city of Novi Sad where he lived until 2004, when he disappeared after allegedly being warned by Serb security service agents that the UN court had indicted him and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Hadzic was a leader of the Krajina Serb region that tried to break away from Croatia after it declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. He faces 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, among them the massacre of several hundred people in 1991 when Croatian Serbs overran the town of Vukovar and deported some 20,000 non-Serbs from the area.

Serb officials said Hadzic (52) was seized as he attempted to meet a helper who was bringing him money.

He was carrying a false identity card and a weapon, but did not resist arrest. Serb president Boris Tadic immediately denied reports that he had been caught in a Serb Orthodox monastery or in a military base in the national park, or while moving from one to the other.

Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic revealed that investigators had begun to close in on Hadzic when he tried to sell a stolen painting attributed to Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani, which was found late last year in the home of one of Hadzic’s friends.

“At that moment he was penniless. He probably got it during the war in Croatia,” Mr Vukcevic said of the painting.

“We have closed a burdensome and gloomy page of our history,” said Mr Tadic, less than eight weeks after announcing the capture of fugitive former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic.

“It was our moral duty. We have done this for the sake of citizens of Serbia, we have done this for the sake of the victims among other nations, we have done this for the sake of reconciliation,” he added.

Mr Tadic hopes the capture of Hadzic will prompt the EU later this year to offer Serbia official candidate members status and allow it to open accession talks.

Such a response may help Mr Tadic’s allies win re-election next year and weaken nationalists who often glorify Serbia’s alleged war criminals and advocate close links with Russia rather than with the EU or United States.

“This is a further important step for Serbia in realising its European perspective and equally crucial for international justice,” the EU’s top three officials said in a statement.

The UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz said Hadzic – the last of the 161 people indicted by the court to be arrested – could be extradited to The Hague “within days”.

“We can now say that no indicted person has successfully evaded the tribunal’s judicial process. This is a precedent of enduring significance,” he added.