February 12, 1996
Web posted at: 9:35 p.m. EST (0215 GMT)
From Correspondent Christiane Amanpour
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- Monday night, two prisoners were bundled out of a Sarajevo jail under tight NATO security. They were driven to a nearby NATO base and flown out of the city.
The Bosnian government says they are two senior Serb officers it arrested on suspicion of war crimes. They have now been extradited to the international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
The development came just hours after the U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke ended another day of shuttle diplomacy aimed at keeping the Dayton peace process on track.
The arrest of the two Serbs -- General Djordje Djukic and Colonel Aleksa Krsmanovic -- raised a key issue: how to pursue war criminals while at the same time maintaining an environment in which all Bosnians can move around freely. Both are enshrined in the peace accords.
Even before the suspects were extradited, the Bosnian government agreed on a future screening process before it makes any further arrests.
"In effect, the government of Bosnia will ask the international war crimes tribunal to retain a list of people it feels should be detained on war crimes grounds," Holbrooke explained. (187K AIFF sound 187K WAV sound)
The agreement is designed to avoid the type of crisis sparked by the two arrests. The pair -- the chief of logistics for the Bosnian Serb army and his deputy -- are accused of being involved in killing civilians during the Serb siege of Sarajevo. The government says it has released all those it held against whom there was no evidence.
So far the international tribunal has indicted about 50 people. Although the NATO-led peace enforcers are not hunting them down, officials say commanders will hand out pictures of the suspects to their troops.
"With respect to IFOR, it's been made clear if there's an encounter there should be an arrest," said John Shattuck, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights. (102K AIFF sound or 102K WAV sound)
These officials say the United States is committed to seeing war criminals punished. And they insist the Dayton accord's demand that all sides cooperate with the tribunal is non- negotiable.
The extradition of these two senior Bosnian Serb officers is a first. Although the international war crimes tribunal has handed down more than two dozen indictments, up to now it had only one low ranking suspect in custody.
![[Imagemap]](/WORLD/images/9601/navbar2.gif){kind=small}
Copyright © 1996 Cable News Network, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.