We want Radovan to surrender, says Karadzic's wife

Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic, the wife of the most wanted Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, called again on her husband to turn himself in, Sarajevo magazine Slobodna Bosna reported Thursday. In an interview with the magazine, the wife of the former Bosnian Serb leader said she and her family do not know where he was, or if he was alive or not. "We only want all this to end, that he surrenders or be arrested. Everything is in his hands and in hands of those people searching for him," Zelen-Karadzic said in the interview. The family, she added, has been going through hell for the last decade owing to the fact that Radovan's whereabouts remain unknown. She said that over a decade the authorities had been trying at the wrong address to reach Radovan through his family and had been "maltreating" the family. Zelen-Karadzic also talked about numerous raids on their home at Pale, a mountain village and the former Bosnian Serb stronghold some 20 kilometres south-east of the capital Sarajevo. The last search, she said, was last June, when soldiers of the European Union Force (EUFOR) in Bosnia seized certain computer files and documentation, including recipes and the dustbag from her vacuum cleaner. The last contact she had with her husband, she said, was in 2002, and he had not given her any clue where he could be hiding. In 2005, Zelen-Karadzic publicly called on her husband to give himself up. She said she had done so because a CIA agent had asked her to after her son Sasa was allegedly detained by the US intelligence. Nothing, however, happened. "There was no reaction to my public call. He did not even react when his mother died, when our son was detained and maltreated or when our youngest grandchild underwent complicated hip surgery," Zelen-Karadzic said. The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Karadzic for war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws and customs of war and severe breaches of the Geneva Conventions during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The indictment include Karadzic's alleged responsibility for ordering the mass killing of up to 8,000 Muslim men from the eastern Muslim enclave of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, after Bosnian Serb troops captured the area. Karadzic remains at large more than 12 years after the ICTY raised an indictment against him. dpa zl fs