A P R I L 2 0 0 0
Why is France protecting indicted war criminals in the sector of Bosnia it controls?
by Chuck Sudetic
theatlantic.com
Excerpt:
"Bizarre"
THE United States military and its major NATO allies have never wanted to be a police force. The purpose of an army, they say, is to kill the enemy's soldiers until the enemy submits, not to chase criminals or to make the streets and highways safe for commerce. The Dayton Accords, signed on December 14, 1995, required NATO to step between the warring armies in Bosnia and to oversee the storage of their weapons. NATO's American, British, French, and other contingents divided Bosnia up into sectors and completed much of this work within a few weeks of their arrival there, in December of 1995. But the success of the peace, as the accords say in plain English, depends on Bosnia's becoming safe for thousands of refugees to return to the homes from which they were expelled from 1992 through 1995. This means establishing law and order; and because the local authorities in many areas of Bosnia are the same thugs who drove the refugees out, it is up to NATO's Stabilization Force in Bosnia, known as SFOR, to act like a police department and arrest men indicted for war crimes.
Disagreements about this task have worsened already strained relations between France and the other major NATO allies. American diplomats and NATO military officers say that the French army has reneged on its commitments and has lagged behind the other contingents in Bosnia by refusing to arrest Milan Lukic and other Serbs linked with the most heinous violence Europe has witnessed in fifty years. Grounds for this allegation are not hard to find. France's Defense Minister, Alain Richard, has mocked the credibility of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, calling it a "spectacle." Louise Arbour, the tribunal's former chief prosecutor, has said that NATO's French sector in eastern Bosnia is a "safe haven" for Serb war criminals. [For an extensive discussion of the tribunal see "A New Kind of Justice," by Charles Trueheart.] French soldiers, unlike their counterparts in the British and American sectors of Bosnia, have become regulars at caf‚s frequented and sometimes owned by indicted Serbs. And a French military-intelligence officer compromised operations to drive the twice-indicted Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, from his hideout in the French sector -- something about which NATO commanders have expressed great anger.
At NATO's military headquarters in Bosnia and Belgium, off-the-record commentary about the French army's behavior is venomous. One former tribunal official says that French and U.S. diplomats working on a task force to arrest war criminals have at times berated each other using "terms they don't use even in referring to the Serbs." France's reluctance to arrest men indicted by the tribunal has baffled the diplomats, political scientists, and analysts who know the country best. "I don't have an answer for the present situation," says Stanley Hoffmann, a Harvard professor who is among the most well-respected analysts in the United States of French politics. "It is very bizarre."
So what have the French authorities done -- or not done -- to arrest Serbs indicted for war crimes? And why?
[snip]
_________________
Excerpt from P A R T II:
What specific embarrassments might the French President, government, and army have to fear in testimony by Karadzic or Mladic during a judicial spectacular in The Hague?
Srebrenica. France led the diplomatic campaign in 1993 that moved the UN Security Council to declare the town of Srebrenica a "safe area" and promise to protect its 40,000 Muslims. [...]
The pilots. The most intensive round of hostage negotiations between the French government and the Serbs took place in December of 1995, just before the signing of the Dayton Accords. Chirac sent a special agent, Jean-Charles Marchiani, to Serbia and Bosnia to negotiate the release of two French pilots who had been captured by the Serbs after bailing out of their plane during a NATO bombing run the previous August. According to Le Monde, Marchiani, a shadowy right-wing political leader and an experienced hostage negotiator, used a spy, Jugoslav Petrusic, a dual French-Yugoslav national, to keep tabs on the captive pilots as Marchiani traveled between Pale, Belgrade, and Paris. [...]
Economic links. French diplomats have for years advocated lifting all economic sanctions against Serbia, and another potential embarrassment to the French President and government could be a revelation of the extent of government involvement in business dealings between the Milosevic regime and French companies. [...]
Another questionable business link involves Jean-Pierre Rozan, a Paris-based minerals trader. Rozan said during an interview that he has been buying ores from Serbian mines for the past ten years, including the entire period when doing business with Milosevic's Yugoslavia was banned by the UN Security Council. Rozan said that in July of last year he acquired a stake in a mine in Kosovo whose other owners are Milosevic-controlled companies and banks. About half of the mine lies in a patch of northern Kosovo patrolled by French troops that are part of the NATO force occupying the province; these troops have prevented the area's Albanians from returning to their homes. [...]
Psycho killers. Rozan said that purely by coincidence, in the offices a floor below his is a company that has also had dealings with Milosevic's network. This company is a telecommunications firm known as Geolink, and it is involved in another blooming embarrassment for the French President and government. Geolink has been named in a percolating scandal whose main players are a gang of Serb gunmen, the Yugoslav government, and France's intelligence service, the Direction G‚n‚rale de la S‚curit‚ Ext‚rieure. In 1997, according to U.S. intelligence reports, the DGSE hired a group of Serb mercenaries and three Yugoslav combat airplanes, with pilots and mechanics, for the armed forces of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of Zaire, who was unsuccessfully attempting to avoid being overthrown. Citing U.S. intelligence reports and the French press, The New York Times reported that a Geolink official had offered, in a letter to the office of President Chirac, to recruit the Serb mercenaries. One of the fighters was later identified as Jugoslav Petrusic, the same spy who had kept tabs on the hostage French pilots. Petrusic, the Times reported, ruled over one town in Zaire "like a petty tyrant, summarily executing dozens of people."
The scandal erupted again last November 25, when the Yugoslav government's press spokesman, Goran Matic, announced that the Serbian police had arrested five members -- one of them Petrusic -- of a spy cell, code-named Spider and set up by the DGSE to assassinate Slobodan Milosevic. Matic said that Petrusic had been a member of the French Foreign Legion and was a DGSE agent who had been run by a case officer named Patrick Fort for ten years. Matic also alleged that Petrusic had participated in spying missions in Bosnia, assassinations in Yugoslavia, a 1994 massacre in Algeria, the 1995 executions in Srebrenica, the 1997 mercenary operation in Zaire, and the killing of Albanians in Kosovo during the NATO bombardment last year.
Matic's charges looked preposterous at first, and some of them still do. But some of the arrested men have indeed been linked with the Srebrenica massacre. The DGSE's chief, Jacques Dewatre, lent credibility to others among Matic's allegations by resigning a few weeks later. Government spokesmen denied it, but Le Monde wrote that Dewatre had probably been fired because DGSE operations in Yugoslavia had gone awry. [snip]
________________ |
