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The wife of Bosnia's top war crimes fugitive, Radovan Karadzic told a Bosnian Serb daily newspaper yesterday she thinks her husband will never surrender to the UN war crimes tribunal. "No one from our family can make that decision and tell Radovan to surrender," Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic told Nezavisne Novine daily. "I think he will never surrender." As the wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Karadzic is accused of having masterminded together with former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic Bosnia's 1992-95 war, which took 260,000 lives and left 1.8 million people homeless. Karadzic, 58, and his wartime military chief, General Ratko Mladic, are the two most-wanted suspects sought by the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands.
"This is a political court that only tries Serbs. Radovan told me, the last time we spoke, that he does not acknowledge this court as a legal court," Zelen-Karadzic said adding that she has not seen or spoken to her husband for several years. Since being indicted for genocide in 1995, Karadzic has been on the run and is believed to be hiding in disguise deep in the mountains of Bosnia and surrounded by armed bodyguards. European Union peacekeepers deployed in Bosnia have a standing order to arrest him. The leadership of the Bosnian Serb mini-state, which together with a Muslim-Croat federation comprises postwar Bosnia, is under constant pressure by the West to hand over Karadzic. The US State Department has offered $5 million (Dh18.36 million) for information leading to his capture. Zelen-Karadzic told Nezavisne Novine that Bosnian Serb officials approached her several months ago and offered $32,600 (Dh119,700) and scholarships for their children if her husband surrendered to the court. "One man in civilian clothes and another in a police uniform told us what was the government's offer but we told them we are not in any kind of contact with Radovan," Zelen Karadzic said.
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