By Nick Constable
THE world's most wanted war criminal Radovan Karadzic will sleep easier following the terrorist carnage in London. As the 10th anniversary of his Srebrenica massacre - in which 8,000 died - passes tomorrow, he has again slipped down the list of priorities for Western leaders.
Both the CIA and MI6 know that hunting an active Al Qaeda linked terror cell is far more pressing than tracking the genocidal former Serbian leader.
With mistrust continuing to fester between prosecutors at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague and peacekeeping troops in the former Yugoslavia, Karadzic will take comfort from the problems dogging his pursuers.
Even the sacking of 60 "corrupt" Serb officials by the UN's Bosnia envoy Lord Ashdown a year ago has apparently failed to break the underground network which helps him evade justice.
Lord Ashdown blames the post-war governments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro and Croatia and Macedonia for shielding Karadzic, 59, and his general, Ratko Mladic, who is also indicted for genocide.
Many Bosnian Muslims are convinced that Western governments have done a deal with Karadzic because he knows too much about their own activities.
Eight years ago Nato accused the French of tipping him off about a raid, although no evidence was produced.
By coincidence, Karadzic's son Aleksander was arrested by peacekeepers in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale hours before the London bombings.
Dr Dana Allin, an expert in Balkan affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said: "High-level attention on the Balkans certainly diminishes with events such as this and 9/11. Karadzic may be reassured by the attack on London although I can't imagine he's particularly comfortable. I suspect he spends a lot of his time drowning his sorrows." Dr Allin said Karadzic was protected by Serbian supporters just as Nazi war criminals were shielded after the Second World War.
Karadzic and Mladic have both been indicted for genocide by prosecutors in The Hague. The charges relate to the days after July 11, 1995 when the BosnianSerb army under Karadzic's control entered a UN "safe haven" at Srebrenica, disarmed a battalion of Dutch peacekeepers, separated around 8,000 Muslim men and boys from their families and shot them. It was the worst war crime since the end of the Second World War. Last year the UN Tribunal's chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte criticised Nato for failing to cooperate fully with her own tracking team drawn from the secret intelligence services of several countries including Britain.
"Unfortunately we often do not receive feedback from those we notify about the whereabouts of fugitives, " she said. "If we, for instance, locate Karadzic in a certain place and relay that information to those who have to check it out and arrest him, the response should be instantaneous because the fugitive will not remain in the same place for 24 or 48 hours." She quoted one example, in February 2004, in which the UN pinpointed the ex-Serb leader to a specific house. Nato took no action.
Tribunal staff are also seething over an 18-month delay in supplying them with love letters to his wife Ljiljana.
The letters appear to have been seized by Nato troops during raids in 2003 and were leaked to a newspaper. Despite requests, The Hague has still not received copies to authenticate.
Control of the letters and other intelligence material uncovered by Nato passed to a 7,000-strong EU force under the command of British general David Leakey, last November. About 80 per cent of his troops simply swapped berets from Nato to EUFOR. But this taskforce has no jurisdiction in Montenegro, where Karadzic is reportedly hiding in mountains near his home town of Niksic.
Last week Florence Hartmann, spokeswoman for the War Crimes Tribunal, said: "It is an outrage this man has not yet faced justice and all international leaders need to focus on this. Imagine the world's response if senior members of the Nazi party had escaped the Nuremberg Trials."
