22 January 1998 - SEALs conduct rendition operation in Bijeljina, Republic of Serpska. resulted in the capture of a Person for War Crimes.

U.S. Troops Capture 'Serb Adolf'

By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, January 23, 1998; Page A29

SARAJEVO, Bosnia, Jan. 22 – U.S. troops today acted for the first time to capture an alleged Bosnian war criminal, rushing from unmarked vans parked in the northern Serb-dominated city of Bijeljina to seize a former concentration camp commander accused of killing at least 16 Muslims and abusing or terrorizing scores of others.

Goran Jelisic, a 29-year-old who described himself a "Serb Adolf" and had made little attempt to hide his presence in the city, was surrounded without incident as he left his apartment at roughly 8 a.m. He then was transferred to Tuzla, site of the main U.S. military base in Bosnia, and immediately flown to The Hague, where he was placed in the custody of officials from the International War Crimes Tribunal there.

The U.S. military action was planned in advance, according to officials here. But it was carried out during a week in which human rights groups have sharply criticized the Clinton administration for refusing to let U.S. troops seize any of the dozens of the indicted war crimes suspects still at large in this country. U.S. forces provided backup support to British troops that fatally shot one Serb and captured another last July and to Dutch troops that seized two Croats in December.

The U.S. Embassy here issued a general warning to Americans that they could be at risk for reprisals. But Jelisic was probably one of the least provocative targets Washington could pick. He is not considered close to the hard-line Serb leadership and, according to one well-informed diplomat here, "was not popular" among fellow Serbs in Bijeljina. A U.S. military officer said he was "a thug" without political standing.

Graham Blewitt, deputy prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, nonetheless hailed Jelisic's arrest and said the allegations against him "are very serious. The offenses committed were horrific, and the accused was personally involved in a lot of them. We regard him as a significant arrest."

Blewitt added that "we hope this is not the end of it," alluding to the approximately 50 additional publicly indicted war crimes suspects who have not been turned over to the tribunal. An unknown number of combatants have been indicted secretly by the tribunal, which the United Nations established in 1993 to seek justice for the horrendous human rights abuses that occurred during the 1992-1995 ethnic war.

The two Bosnian entities – the Serb Republic and Croat-Muslim federation – are required under the 1995 Dayton peace accord that imposed a cease-fire here to surrender all accused war criminals within their jurisdictions. But the top two targets, hard-line Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and former Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, are well-protected by armed guards. The West's strategy has been to try to undermine their power.

The U.S. military maintains an estimated 8,000 troops in the northeast "corridor" of Bosnia that includes Bijeljina, a city of fewer than 100,000 people that remains home to many hard-line Serbs. But the city itself is not patrolled routinely by Americans and instead falls under the responsibility of Russian peacekeeping forces operating under NATO command. Officials here say that Moscow's policy bars any involvement by its soldiers in capturing war criminals, however, and the Russians were not informed in advance of the American operation.

In a June 1995 indictment by the tribunal, Jelisic was charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war, and grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of prisoners of war. The allegations grew out of reports that he systematically killed Muslims who had been detained at a bus company, a police headquarters in the city of Brcko, and the Luka concentration camp.

In addition, according to a U.N. spokesman here, Jelisic "created an atmosphere of terror [at the camp] by killing, abusing and threatening the detainees, thereby subjecting them to extreme psychological trauma, degradation and fear." Some of the evidence to be presented by the tribunal is based on exhumations conducted near Brcko last year.

Dutch National Radio reported in December that Jelisic told an interviewer he had no regrets for his actions in Brcko, saying he slept well because "I never used knives to kill people. . . . That's why God invented the pistol."

When he was captured today, Jelisic was carrying a pistol, according to U.S. officials in Washington.

The tribunal's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, has promised speedy trials for all those detained. But the tribunal has four trials underway and five more awaiting a courtroom, making it unlikely that Jelisic will be tried for another year, officials said.

Arbour's predecessor, Richard Goldstone and a group of former U.S. and allied officials and jurists have criticized the Clinton administration for not ordering U.S. troops to seize alleged war criminals. Goldstone said the U.S. failure to act had provoked contempt for the Dayton accord and impeded the creation of a new Bosnian nation.

But today, an organizer of the group, Nina Bang-Jensen of the Coalition for International Justice in Washington, praised the administration for orchestrating an "important arrest."

Correspondent Charles Trueheart in Paris and special correspondent Colin Soloway in Sarajevo contributed to this report.

? Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company