by Zoran ZUZA
These days, the authorities in Sarajevo have in vain been wondering why Carla Del Ponte did not offer Hadzihasanovic to switch with Krstic in the dock. Serb leaders had similar questions when General Talic was arrested in Vienna, even though he had previously had numerous meetings with most senior SFOR officers.
Reciprocity: After the news about the arrest of three senior Bosniak officers on war crime charges, Sarajevo was struck by disbelief, and then by panic. The latter struck those who, also based on command responsibility, could have forced generals Hadzihasanovic and Alagic to prevent war crimes against non-Muslim population in towns and villages of central Bosnia, which, as can be seen from unsealed indictments, were anything but random. Massacres, murders, and arson do not qualify as "sporadic incidents" as the Federation BH Prime Minister Alija Behmen said, repeating a recent statement by Alija Izetbegovic.
All that the Federation authorities did once they received the indictments, apart from the fact that they did comply with the request from the Hague, indicated enviable lack of readiness to face the true responsibility of the arrested individuals for committed war crimes.
The newly elected chair of the Council of Ministers Zlatko Lagumdzija was the first one to take the hot seat. According to the Federation Law About Cooperation With the Hague Tribunal, adopted in 1996, he was supposed, as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, to receive the indictments and pass them on to the Federation Ministry of Justice.
Disgrace: In a feverish attempt to win a political point or two in the public, Lagumdzija made one wrong move after another and gave numerous hasty statements. Thus, in front of the gathered journalists he stated in a self-congratulatory manner that the state has provided lawyers for all the indicted officers, adding that the state was determined to support them until their guilt is proven. Then one of the journalists asked whether that meant that the state was also supporting Karadzic and Mladic, to which the informal leader of the Alliance for Changes, trying to suppress his anger, stated that "it is indecent to make such comparisons". Politics and logic are not related.
The attempt of the authorities in Sarajevo to try to suppress information that the officers were arrested by the Police by claims that they had voluntarily surrendered themselves to the authorities was both tragic and comical. The Ministry of Justice labeled as voluntary surrender the fact that at six o'clock in the morning four special forces policemen knocked on the door of the family home of General Alagic in Sanski Most and informed him that they were taking him to Sarajevo "to be questioned". Disgrace with which the government tried to save its political honor continued with the statement that the officers, once their extradition custody was over, voluntarily boarded the plane that took them to the Hague. Journalists who followed the journey of the officers from the central prison in Sarajevo to the airport, however, did not see any planes, as was stated in the government release, but a SFOR helicopter that took off from the base in Butmir, which means that the suspicious NATO soldiers nevertheless decided to "see off" Bosniak "volunteers" to the base in Tuzla, and from there to the prison in Scheveningen.
The whole story about the indictments of the BH officers, and their arrest sends two very strong messages.
The first one was sent to the authorities in the Republic of Srpska and it goes like this: after the adoption of the Law About Cooperation With the Hague Tribunal, the Supreme Court and the Srpska Police, like their colleagues from the Federation BH, will be very busy.
The second message was sent to the former wartime political leaders in Sarajevo, as the evidence is pointing in their direction. True, it seems that there is still no political readiness to send Bosniak political and military leaders responsible for crimes against Serbs to the Hague, while Karadzic and Mladic are still at large, but we feel free to advise the current commander of the Federation BH Army Atif Dudakovic and his predecessors Rasim Delic and Sefer Halilovic to avoid testifying in the Hague. Drawing a lesson from the experience of General Hadzihasanovic, it is likely that Ejup Ganic, Haris Silajdzic, and Alija Izetbegovic, will take the same course of action, although they definitely know what sort of heroes Hadzihasanovic, Alagic and Kubura were.