New News: Serbia Arrests Last Fugitive Accused of War Crimes

New News: Serbia Arrests Last Fugitive Accused of War Crimes Against Croats

I chose to write about this topic because of two reasons: 1) with everything else going on in the world, this has largely been ignored and 2) it’s news that affects me personally. From 1991 until 1995, Croatia was in a war with Serbian rebel forces led by Goran Hadzic as well as other Serb leaders who believed that Croatia should not be independent from former Yugoslavia. Approximately 10,000 people were killed in this war and 161 people had been indicted with the most recent (before Hadzic) having been Serbian military commander Ratko Mladic less than two months ago. *Note that this event is different from the massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia & Herzegovina on July 11, 1995.

According to the article, “Goran Hadzic refuses to plea before UN war crimes court” on the BBC News website, Hadzic faces 14 war crimes charges which include: persecution, extermination and torture. Hadzic had also been on the run for 7 years after having been indicted in 2004 and then disappeared. He is also being held responsible for the massacre in Vukovar in 1991 in which 300 men were killed and 20,000 people had been deported from the town in Croatia after it had been captured. The BBC source also writes, “Correspondents say the country hopes the arrests and extraditions will allow it to draw a line under the war crimes story and move closer to European Union membership” something that has been preventing them from obtaining membership. The article also lists the counts against Goran Hadzic separate from the rest of the story, perhaps in an effort to make it clear what he is being held accountable for. These counts include: one count of persecution of Croats and other non-Serbs, three counts of extermination and murder of hundreds of Croats and non-Serbs, five counts of imprisonment, torture, inhumane acts and cruel treatment against detainees of camps where torture and sexual assault were common, two counts of deportation and forcible transfer of up to 90,000 Croats and non-Serbs from parts of Croatia and three counts of wanton destruction and plunder of public and private property. The article on the BBC website is short and to the point. It explains who Hadzic is, what crimes he committed and when these occurred. The end paragraph about the European Union membership is the reason why my father believes that the government in Serbia had known where these last two fugitives were the whole time but that’s just a biased opinion with no real facts to back them up.

The New York Times article by Marlise Simons is set in Paris, France. Simons also writes, in the opening of her article, “The last Serbian fugitive wanted by a United Nations war crimes tribunal was arrested in a Serbian forest early Wednesday, a quiet event that appeared to remove the final major obstacle blocking the nation’s access to Western money and European membership”. This article unlike the BBC one tells readers that Goran Hadzic was arrested in the village of Krusedol in Northern Serbia. The reason he was found and captured is said to be that he was attempting to sell a painting by Modigliani because he ran out of money after being on the run for seven years and that this painting was listed as one of several by the artist to have been stolen. Police said that he was armed and had changed his appearance when he was arrested. Simons writes that he was a former warehouse worker and joined rebel Serbs in 1991 to seize one third of Croatia and turn it into a territory for Serbs only. The article in The New York Times is a little longer than the BBC article and includes a photo of Hadzic having been arrested. Both articles are similar in their information as well as having similar headlines.

The article on the USA Today website, “Serbia arrests last Balkan war crimes fugitive” differs from the BBC and The New York Times articles due largely to the fact that it includes a video from the Associated Press. The video along with the article that Western-leaning Serbian President Boris Tadic said, “It was our moral duty. We have done this for the sake of citizens of Serbia, we have done this for the sake of the victims among other nations, we have done this for the sake of reconciliation”. The AP states that Hadzic rose to fame due to his links to former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his secret police. The tragedy in Vukovar in 1991 was said to be the “first European city entirely destroyed since World War II”. Again this article mentions the fact that this arrest along with his indiction and the indiction of recently arrested Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic who was a fugitive from 1996 until his arrest in 2008 are important to helping Serbia’s case in becoming a member of the European Union. With the inclusion of the video, it makes the article interactive an idea that is discussed in chapter six of Hanson’s book in the section “What the Web Offers Newspapers”. Hanson writes, “Newspaper Web sites are particularly good at presenting interactive features on breaking news” (216).

Fox News has a slightly different article from the Associated Press than the one on the USA Today website. The article is shorter than the others and includes a picture of Goran Hadzic and includes background information about the war and how many people died. A major difference I noticed was that this article states that Hadzic had been on the run for eight years, one more year from what the other articles had stated. According to a website for The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Case No. IT-04-75-I lists Goran Hadzic’s indictment and is dated May 21, 2004 which means that he had decided to disappear shortly after his indictment. The Fox News website article also ends by stating that “Serbia’s wartime president Milosevic was extradited to the Hague tribunal in 2001 and died there in 2006, while on trial for genocide”.

In an attempt to read about this event from a different perspective, I found an article on the website for Democracy Now! The website includes a brief synopsis-like description of the arrest of Goran Hadzic. The website has a video that includes other headline making news for July 21, 2011. The feature appears among a list of other events that had occurred on that day. The report on the arrest of Hadzic appears around the seventeenth minute of the approximately eighteen minute long video. Although it doesn’t contain much information, this website seems to give an AM New York/Metro type of report on important events and the use of the video report adds to the interactive feature that news websites can include separating them from newspapers. The caption on the website reads: “A daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing over 900 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the United States. The video is also available in Real Video Stream, Real Audio Stream, MP3 download and more and can be shared via email and social marketing websites.

References:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14281390

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/21/world/europe/21goran-hadzic.html?_r=1&ref=serbia

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2011-07-20-serbia-war-crimes_n.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/07/20/report-serbia-arrests-last-un-war-crimes-fugitive/

http://www.icty.org/x/cases/hadzic/ind/en/had-ii040716e.htm

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/21/headlines#16

Hanson, Ralph E. "Chapter 6." Mass Communication: Living in a Media World. Washington, D.C.: CQ, 2008. Print.