Karadzic extradited to Netherlands for UN war tribunal

A plane believed to be carrying former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic landed today in the Netherlands, where a United Nations war crimes tribunal will try him for genocide.

The white business jet arrived at Rotterdam airport, where helicopters and police cars waited to whisk Karadzic to a UN detention centre near The Hague.

The plane with Serbian government markings taxied into a hangar, out of view of reporters and television cameras, before anyone disembarked.

Karadzic faces 11 counts including genocide, extermination and persecution.

Prosecutors allege he masterminded atrocities including the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and the deadly siege of Sarajevo.

Karadzic was flown from Serbia’s capital Belgrade, where he had been detained after Serbian officials said they took him into custody on July 21.

The 63-year-old Karadzic will undergo a registration process at the detention centre to confirm his identity and inform him of his rights. Under normal procedure, he would be fingerprinted, photographed and have an initial medical check-up.

The jail of the UN Yugoslav tribunal is in a separate wing of a Dutch maximum security prison in Scheveningen, a coastal suburb of The Hague, a short commute by prison car to the court where Karadzic will stand trial.

He is expected to be summoned before a judge within a couple of days and will be asked to enter a plea to each of the 11 charges. He may postpone his plea for up to 30 days, however.

It is likely to be several months before the trial begins, and could take several years before it concludes.

Karadzic’s extradition came after police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at stone-hurling extremists in Belgrade city centre last night as ultranationalists protested over government’s plans to extradite him to The Hague.

In anticipation of clashes, riot police had deployed across the capital as busloads of ultranationalists arrived from all over Serbia and Bosnia for the anti-government rally dubbed Freedom For Serbia.

While about 15,000 Serb extremists attended the rally in a main square, several hundred hooligans separated from the group and began hurling stones and burning flares at riot police.

Later, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at large groups of demonstrators, trying to push them away from the square as the rally ended.

Belgrade’s emergency clinic reported that 46 people were injured, including 25 policemen and 21 civilians. Most were only minor injuries, doctors said, adding that only one civilian and one policeman were admitted to hospital. A Spanish TV journalist was among the injured.

Until his arrest, Karadzic had been living in an outlying Belgrade suburb under the false name of Dragan Dabic working as an alternative healer.

His bouffant mane – his trademark during the Bosnian war – had gone, replaced by flowing white hair and a beard that drew comparisons with Santa Claus and Russian mystic Rasputin.

Since his capture Karadzic has asked for and received a shave and a haircut. His lawyer said he looks like an older version of the Bosnian Serb leader who regularly met with top Western officials, diplomats and military commanders during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

During the war he was known as the intellectual face of a monstrous regime blamed for the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War.

Prosecutors allege that the one-time psychiatrist and poet transformed himself into an untranationalist Serb warlord before and during the war.

According to his charges, Karadzic and other senior Bosnian Serb leaders unleashed a reign of terror that began with vicious campaigns of ethnic cleansing to drive Muslims and Croats out of land he considered part of a “Greater Serbia” and reached its bloody climax in the Srebrenica killings.

Along the way, Bosnian Serb forces established internment camps where thousands of non-Serbs were starved, beaten, raped, tortured and murdered. Television images of skeletal prisoners peering through barbed wire fences shocked the world.