BELGRADE: Former US and French Presidents Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac “personally” blocked plans to arrest the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, wanted for a genocide trial over the past 13 years, a former official of the UN war crimes tribunal said in an interview published yesterday.

Florence Hartmann, a former spokeswoman of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecutor, said in an interview with the daily Blic that “sometimes the arrest was blocked personally by Chirac, another time it was Clinton.”

Karadzic was arrested in July in Belgrade after 13 years on the run. ICTY accused him in 1995 of genocide and leveled other charges over his role in atrocities such as the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. The former president of the Serb entity in Bosnia, Karadzic claims that he made a deal with the former US envoy, Richard Holbrooke, to withdraw from politics and fade away and so avoid arrest and trial.

During his run from justice, ICTY had “abundant” information which could have led to Karadzic’s arrest, Hartmann claimed. In her words, apart from France and the United States, Britain also blocked the arrest.

She speculated that Karadzic was finally arrested because the US realized that he would remain an obstacle to the region’s future if he were to be allowed freedom of movement.

Hartmann said “Karadzic’s arrest was less of a problem for Serbia than the West,” but did not elaborate.

Also, Serbia needs to bring all war crime fugitives to justice to clear the key hurdle blocking its path to European Union membership.

After Karadzic’s arrest, only the Bosnian Serb wartime military chief, Ratko Mladic, and the Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic remain on the loose.

Local media speculate that Karadzic’s arrest was a signal of Belgrade’s resolve to close the troublesome ICTY chapter, which had kept it under limited isolation over the past eight years and that Mladic would be arrested during the late summer lull.

In a separate interview, Mladic’s brother Dusan told Blic how the general, who personally commanded operations in Srebrenica, would commit suicide rather than be arrested. A similar claim was made by another relative last week.