The arrest marked a stunning breakthrough for NATO after years of criticism that it had allowed major Bosnian war criminals to escape justice. An ally of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, Krajisnik is regarded by Western diplomats as a nationalist whose influence sometimes exceeded even that of Karadzic. They maintain that he helped finance the “ethnic cleansing” campaign in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war through his black-market businesses and organized the massacres of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians. American officials were exultant. “The dam has broken,” said a top U.S. military official. One senior administration source attributed Krajisnik’s capture largely to the determination of Gen. Wesley Clark, in his last month as the NATO commander, “to clean up as many war criminals as possible.” French troops, embarrassed by accusations of inertia, may have moved in on Krajisnik–secretly indicted at The Hague last winter–following intimations from U.S. forces that they would arrest him if the French failed to act.
Known among compatriots as “the iceman” or “stone face,” Krajisnik served nine months in prison in 1984 for passing bad checks and stealing cement from public-works projects. He was elected speaker of the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, and allegedly enriched himself as a smuggler of cigarettes, weapons and spare parts to the Bosnian Serb Army. Early in the war Krajisnik’s wife was killed by a shell lobbed by Muslim fighters; her death reportedly deepened his hatred of Bosnian Muslims. In his book “To End a War,” America’s U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke described Krajisnik, one of three Bosnian Serbs who signed the Dayton peace accords, as “immovable on any issue.” Krajisnik once called himself “the most Serb of all Serbs on the planet earth.”
Will Karadzic be next to face justice? “It’s absolutely certain that Karadzic is going to be under greater pressure,” says an administration official. “He’s going to be more scared. He’s going to move more, and go deeper underground.” French government sources claim that Karadzic was spotted earlier in the week around the town of Foca, in a mountainous region populated by hard-line Bosnian Serb nationalists. But sources in Pale say he could have crossed into Serbia, out of the reach of NATO troops. At a rally last week in Pale, Bosnian Serb radicals gathered to pay tribute to their fugitive leader. “He has no regrets. Why would he regret anything?” Karadzic’s wife, Ljiljiana Zelen Karadzic, told NEWSWEEK. Asked if she expected his capture, she replied: “His enemies are powerful. I have to be worried.” Given NATO’s apparent new resolve, she has every reason to be.
