During a break in the conference, Talic was quietly arrested by Austrian police. That’s when he heard, for the first time, that the United Nations war-crimes tribunal at The Hague had secretly indicted him last March, a step that requires any U.N. member state to arrest him when it has the chance. He was accused of presiding over acts of ethnic cleansing, mass murder and other abuses when he served as commander of Serb forces in northwestern Bosnia in 1992. “Some of the biggest war crimes were committed in the zone in which General Talic was in charge,” said Amor Masovic, head of the Muslim-run Bosnian State Commission for Missing Persons.
So far, the bodies of more than 1,200 victims have been dug up in the area commanded by Talic. There is no evidence, as yet, that he was personally involved in the atrocities. Most of the dirty work apparently was done by local police or paramilitary forces not under Talic’s direct orders. But Muslim officials charged that he had to know what was going on and could have stopped the mass executions and other abuses. And one mass grave was found at a barracks used by his Bosnian Serb troops; it contained 188 bodies, including those of a 4-year-old boy and his little sister, aged 5 months.
Talic is now locked up at a prison in the Netherlands awaiting his trial, which is probably months away. If convicted, he could face life in prison. Now the chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army, he is the highest-ranking Serb to be arrested so far and the first to be nabbed outside his own country. In Bosnia, NATO peacekeepers have arrested only 20 Serbs, most of them small fry, but the war-crimes tribunal’s pursuit of suspects is becoming more aggressive. When the tribunal secretly indicted Talic, it also charged Radoslav Brdjanin, a former deputy prime minister of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He and Talic allegedly ran a “crisis staff” that oversaw the terrorizing of Muslims and Croats. Without a large bodyguard to protect him, Brdjanin was picked up in Bosnia by British troops in July. Bigger fish, such as Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, both of whom have been indicted for war crimes, apparently remain beyond the reach of the law, at least for now. Still, the arrest of Talic sends them a message: they can hide out in their bleak and battered homelands, but they should forswear the pleasures of foreign travel.
