Word: bosnian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Wedged between the turbulent Drina River and a dark mountainside in eastern Bosnia, the town of Foca is not a place that welcomes strangers. In the early 1990s it was the site of some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. Muslims were driven from their homes, raped, robbed and murdered. Some were dumped in the caves that lace the crags above the town; others were dropped in the river, where at night, according to a resident, corpses could be heard hitting the surface "like logs." Recalls an elderly Serb, insisting on anonymity: "The rapes, the atrocities, everything they...
...does. One spirit haunts Foca and other towns and villages in eastern Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic: that of Dr. Radovan Karadzic. Following the transfer in June of Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague, Karadzic, the Bosnian-Serb leader during the war, is the U.N. war-crime tribunal's most-wanted man. Reports have placed him in these remote, cloud-draped mountains or just across the border in Montenegro. In Foca, he does not lack support. "I am in love with him," says a woman in her 50s who refuses to give her real name. "If he is arrested, we will...
Such attitudes help explain why Karadzic and other indicted war criminals like Bosnian-Serb General Ratko Mladic have eluded capture for six years. Mladic is widely believed to be moving between the Serb Republic and Serbia under the protection of his former comrades in the Bosnian-Serb and possibly Yugoslav armies--a charge officials from both armies deny. Sheltering among the people whose cause they claimed to represent, the indictees have managed to stay one step ahead of those trying to bring them to justice...
...Karadzic and Mladic so far, have recommitted themselves to the task. Rumors that a snatch may take place soon swirl around the region. DON'T TOUCH HIM! warn posters of Karadzic pasted up recently by a Serb cultural group in nearby northern Montenegro. Zoran Zuza, a well-informed Bosnian-Serb journalist and political analyst in the former wartime stronghold of Pale, says Karadzic "realizes that he has never been in such dire straits...
Still, before anyone can be sent to the Hague, he has to be caught. And while Bosnian-Serb police are unlikely to turn on their own anytime soon, NATO troops responsible for apprehending war criminals say they are taking a tougher line. A former U.S. official told TIME on condition of anonymity that last year "there were failed efforts" to nab Karadzic. "We had some big disappointments," the official said. On a visit to Sarajevo in July, NATO Secretary-General George Robertson underscored his commitment to arrests. "There is no safe haven, and there is no statute of limitations," Robertson...