Karadzic keeps hunters guessing

Nestled high on a plateau between thickly-forested mountain ridges whose rocky tops are covered with snow, the sleepy, remote village of Cerbici looks like a dream destination for trekkers and nature lovers.

However, Celebici is known not for its tourist attractions but as a possible refuge for Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader charged with genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslims.

Mr Karadzic has been on the run from international justice for almost a decade, supposedly protected by a network of hardline supporters in Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia's Serb Republic.

The West's failure to arrest him or his military chief Ratko Mladic is back in the headlines as Bosnia prepares to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the massacre on Monday.

Celebici villagers say they have never seen Mr Karadzic. Nato intelligence indicated the 60-year-old former psychiatrist was here in 2002 but a two-day search operation failed to find him.

"But even if he is around they can never catch him," Celebici's only grocer Milivoje Brkovic said wryly, looking out through his shop window where a faded Karadzic poster was hanging. "They would have done that by now if they could."

On July 11, 1995 Bosnian Serb troops overran the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica as UN Dutch troops stood by helplessly. The slaughter over the next seven days was Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.

Mr Karadzic and Mr Mladic are also charged with the wartime siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 people were killed. Some 200,000 people died in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, most of them Bosnian Muslims.

"The ongoing failure of Nato forces to apprehend Radovan Karadzic and its failure to arrest Ratko Mladic when he was in Bosnia, compounds the international community's dereliction of duty to protect the inhabitants of Srebrenica," New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch said in a report last month.

Mr Mladic lived in Serbia until 2002 but kept a low profile. The United Nations war crimes tribunal in the Hague says he is still being sheltered by the military or police there but Belgrade says it cannot find him.

Mr Karadzic's whereabouts have been a mystery for the last eight years. The UN court's chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte says he is hiding in eastern Bosnia and Montenegro and has chided Nato for not doing enough to catch him.

An official at the Sarajevo headquarters of Nato, which handed over its peacekeeping mantle to the European Union in December to concentrate on the war crimes hunt, admitted the alliance was in the dark about Mr Karadzic's current location.

"We don't know where he is exactly, he could be in Serbia or Bosnia or travelling in between," the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said.

Nato's last arrest operation based on a credible sighting was in September 2003, when troops searched an Orthodox monastery in the eastern Bosnian town of Cajnice, some 20 kilometres from Celebici.

Both locations are in a vast area neighbouring Serbia and Mr Karadzic's native Montenegro, where he can count on porous borders, thick forests and support from local residents.

The military alliance's last confirmed sighting of Mr Karadzic was in mid-2001 at a Belgrade restaurant. Montenegrin journalist and Karadzic watcher Seki Radoncic says Serbia is still his most likely hideout.

"All his logistics, Yugoslav Army generals, policemen from Serbia, the Serbian Orthodox Church, all of that is in Belgrade," Mr Radoncic said. "These three... coordinated the break-up of Bosnia and the creation of Bosnia's Serb Republic."

Mr Karadzic's most vocal supporters are based in Belgrade, where they have published and promoted his wartime letters, poetry, children's stories and memoirs. But even they say they have no idea of his whereabouts.