Bosnia peace overseer Paddy Ashdown sacked 60 Bosnian Serb officials yesterday over their failure to arrest top war-crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic.
Those removed included Parliamentary Speaker Dragan Kalinic, leader of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) founded by Karadzic in 1990, and Interior Minister Zoran Djeric.
"I decided to remove these people from public and party positions," Ashdown told a news conference.
Ashdown has sweeping powers to remove officials seen as obstructing the peace process under the 1995 Dayton accord that ended Europe's worst conflict since World War II. More than 200,000 people died in the 1992-1995 war, most of them Muslims.
"It was Dragan Kalinic's responsibility as leader of the SDS to prevent fraud, abuse and criminality ... to ensure that the party founded by Radovan Karadzic was no longer financing him," Ashdown said.
Bosnia's Serb Republic has been under growing Western pressure to arrest Karadzic and other war crimes suspects still at large. Karadzic is said to be hiding in remote eastern Bosnia, protected by hardline loyalists.
Bosnian Serb officials insist they don't know the whereabouts of Karadzic, twice indicted by the Hague war crimes tribunal for genocide together with his military commander Ratko Mladic, who is believed to be in neighboring Serbia.
They are accused of involvement in the siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys after the fall of the eastern town of Srebrenica.
Chief UN war-crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said on Tuesday that Karadzic could be arrested as early as this week.
Kalinic, a wartime ally of Karadzic, confirmed he had been sacked.
"I was removed today by the High Representative," Kalinic told the parliament of the Serb Republic, one of Bosnia's two post-war entities. "I was removed because of Radovan Karadzic.
"This is the most brutal political purge ... because besides me many others will be removed," he said.
SDS members of parliament left the assembly in protest against the dismissal, saying they would not take part in its work until further notice.
ACCUSATION
UN court officials on Tuesday accused fugitives and their backers in the Balkans of trying to escape prosecution by waiting until international pressure brings an end to war-crime trials.
Carla del Ponte, the prosecutor of the tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, and Theodor Meron, the court's chief judge, told the UN Security Council a dire shortage of funds was seriously hindering work. Japan owes nearly half of the US$88 million in arrears.
The Hague-based war crimes tribunal and a second in Arusha, Tanzania, on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are to complete probes by the end of this year, end trials by 2008 and close down before the end of 2010.
"An unintended consequence of the completion strategy is that fugitives and their protective networks are trying to buy time until 2008, in hopes of evading justice, as they believe the time to be tried in The Hague will soon expire," Del Ponte told the 15-nation council.
"It certainly appears that some in the former Yugoslavia think that, by hiding from arrest, they can `wait out' the tribunal until it goes away," Meron said.
The Bosnian Serb Republic, where Karadzic is hiding, has pledged to step up efforts to detain suspects. It hopes to join NATO's Partnership for Peace program next month.
Del Ponte said authorities in Serbia and Montenegro had allowed the country to "become a safe haven for fugitives."
Airlines in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Singapore yesterday canceled flights to and from the Indonesian island of Bali, after a nearby volcano catapulted an ash tower into the sky. Australia’s Jetstar, Qantas and Virgin Australia all grounded flights after Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki on Flores island spewed a 9km tower a day earlier. Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia, India’s IndiGo and Singapore’s Scoot also listed flights as canceled. “Volcanic ash poses a significant threat to safe operations of the aircraft in the vicinity of volcanic clouds,” AirAsia said as it announced several cancelations. Multiple eruptions from the 1,703m twin-peaked volcano in
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done
Farmer Liu Bingyong used to make a tidy profit selling milk but is now leaking cash — hit by a dairy sector crisis that embodies several of China’s economic woes. Milk is not a traditional mainstay of Chinese diets, but the Chinese government has long pushed people to drink more, citing its health benefits. The country has expanded its dairy production capacity and imported vast numbers of cattle in recent years as Beijing pursues food self-sufficiency. However, chronically low consumption has left the market sloshing with unwanted milk — driving down prices and pushing farmers to the brink — while
RSS