“The first thing I remember when I think about it is relief, because a very delicate and dangerous operation was successfully completed,” Vukcevic said in July 2021.
Vladimir Vukcevic, the first Serbian war crimes prosecutor, passed away two days ago at the age of 75.
He will be remembered as the prosecutor during whose mandate Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were arrested, two of the most wanted fugitives by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Vukcevic, in an interview, talked about the details of how the arrests of Karadzic and Mladic were carried out.
Karadzic, the political leader of the Serbs in BiH, was arrested on July 21st, 2008, and nine days later was extradited to The Hague.
“What is the first thing I remember when I think about it? Relief, because a very delicate and dangerous operation was successfully completed,” Vukcevic said in an interview in July 2021.
Intercepted bus
In March 2019, the court in The Hague sentenced Karadzic to life imprisonment for crimes committed in BiH between 1992 and 1995.
Mladic, the wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, was arrested on May 26th, 2011, in the village of Lazarevo, near the Vojvodina city of Zrenjanin, in the house of one of his relatives.
In November 2017, the Hague tribunal sentenced Mladic to life imprisonment, finding him guilty of ten out of eleven counts, including genocide, deportation, murders, inhumane treatment during the expulsion of the population from Srebrenica, terror, and attacks on civilians in Sarajevo.
In an interview in July 2021, Vukcevic emphasized that the operation to arrest Karadzic, who had been in hiding for nearly a decade, was “very delicate.”
“We kept him under surveillance, monitored his movements, and one day he left with bags, heading somewhere, toward public transport. He got on a bus going in the direction of (Belgrade suburb) Batajnica.”
They suspected, he said, that Karadzic had been tipped off about an impending arrest, and therefore they had to act.
“Since there were other people on the bus, I emphasized that we had to do this without anyone being hurt, without any casualties,” Vukcevic recalled.
One of the members of the Security and Intelligence Agency (BIA) was among the passengers on the bus.
“He was reporting to us that Karadzic sat down, that there was no panic with him, and that he was calmly observing the passengers around him – as if he knew he was about to be arrested. We followed him, followed him, followed him, and at one point I told Miki (Rakic, advisor to the then-president of Serbia, Boris Tadic) – ‘we won’t wait for him to get off; we’ll stop the bus and move in.’ And that’s what happened.”
The bus was intercepted, and a BIA agent approached Karadzic and “warned him not to cause any trouble, flee, or resist.”
“He handled it very disciplined, if not cold-blooded,” Vukcevic said.
Over the years, there has been speculation in the media that Karadzic was actually arrested not on July 21st, but three days earlier – on Friday.
However, Vukcevic denied this.
“No, no, no, everything happened that day,” he stressed.
Karadzic was immediately taken to the BIA and then to the War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office, where his identity was confirmed.
Vukcevic said that the transformation of the former Republika Srpska (RS) leader was “Hollywood-like.”
“He usually walked quite briskly,” he recalled.
“However, at that time, he had grown his hair and beard and dragged his leg as if he had stilts – completely changed behavior. He didn’t want to drink anything, only water. That night, he asked to be shaved, and immediately, he was the old Karadzic… He walked fast and completely returned to his personality,” Vukcevic said.
Arrest of Mladic
The Dayton Agreement, which ended the war in BiH in November 1995, was nearly six months from being signed, and General Ratko Mladic’s name appeared on the ICTY indictment, right next to Karadzic.
After the war, Mladic was removed from the command of the Army of the RS (VRS) by Biljana Plavsic, then president of the entity, and from 1996, he was considered a fugitive from justice, although he was often seen living freely in Serbia, according to international agencies.
Only after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s government was Mladic forced to completely disappear from public view and spent over a decade in hiding.
The search for him yielded no results, and failure to meet international obligations damaged Serbia’s diplomatic relations, so in 2005, war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic was appointed head of the Action Team for locating and arresting Hague fugitives.
“The Hague Prosecutor’s Office requested that prosecutors lead the teams searching for the indicted. At the first meeting with Prime Minister (Vojislav) Kostunica, with the heads of civil and military services, and the police director, I had only two questions – do I have the support of the Government of the Republic of Serbia, and do I have your personal support?” Vukcevic recalled.
He said he received two “yes” answers to the repeated question.
The team met once a week, usually at the Palace of Serbia in Belgrade, but later gatherings were moved to the headquarters of the BIA to avoid possible eavesdropping.
“I immediately noticed that there was an obstruction, primarily regarding Karadzic and Mladic. The Hague suspected that military security was protecting Mladic, but I very quickly convinced them that this was not true.”
Vukcevic claimed that the problem arose within the BIA, where Director Rade Bulatovic was replaced in 2008 by Sasa Vukadinovic.
“At one point, we searched for Mladic in the house of his wife’s brother, in Mostanica. We searched the brother’s house, who was not there, but the BIA members refused to enter the second house, claiming they didn’t have a warrant from an investigative judge. Later it turned out that Mladic was watching us from that house – the obstruction went that far.”
When asked if Serbian state authorities later investigated these obstructions, even after Mladic’s arrest, Vukcevic said it was not done.
However, in May 2011, everything changed – and it all started with a family gathering in the house in Lazarevo, a village near Zrenjanin.
“Their family celebration was Djurdjevdan, and the family of his son was visiting, so we noticed they were taking many photographs – we thought there was a courier in the house to take pictures of the family to BiH because we had information that Mladic was there. We waited for the courier, but he didn’t leave, so we decided to carry out the operation,” Vukcevic said.
He noted that the Action Team had information that after the failed arrest in Mostanica, Mladic had fled toward Zrenjanin.
At the time of the operation, the entire top of the Action Team was outside Serbia: Prosecutor Vukcevic was in Brijuni meeting with Croatian prosecutor Mladen Bajic and Hague prosecutor Serge Brammertz, while the Serbian president’s advisor, Miodrag Rakic, and the head of the BIA, Sasa Vukadinovic, were on an official trip to the United States (U.S.).
“When the police entered the house, Mladic tried to hide behind a door. When they found him, they didn’t recognize him immediately, although he didn’t have a Hollywood-style disguise like Karadzic. Documents with the name Ratko Mladic were on the table, and he admitted they were his.”
The news quickly reached Croatia, from where, a little later, journalists also learned of it.
“Miki (Miodrag) Rakic called me and told me that the courier was actually Ratko Mladic himself. I was urgently transported by helicopter first to Zagreb, then to our border, and we were all quickly back in Belgrade,” Vukcevic recalled.
