Serbia Karadzic arrest “a watershed” – Albright 23/07/08 13:27 CET

The former US Sectretary of State, who was Ambassador to the United Nations at the time the Bosnian War ended has said the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is an historic achievement for international justice.

Madeleine Albright said: “Radovan Karadzic was the person actually responsible for massive ethnic cleansing and killings in Serbia and Bosnia. It is a watershed event because it proves that you can’t constantly forever hide from justice. It is really something that’s very, very important for the Bosnian people, the victims. We all remember the horrible pictures of what happened to people and what happened in Srebrenica. One of the reasons that we established the war-crimes tribunal was to assign individual guilt in order to make clear that there was not collective guilt. And so now, I think the Serbian people under new leadership will be able to really rejoin the international community and be part of Europe.”

The UN described the events at Srebrenica as ‘scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.‘