Karadzic party votes on suspending war crimes suspects
( 2001-12-25 14:16) (7)
The nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS) voted on Monday to expel war crimes suspects from the party, including its founder, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader.
A majority of the delegates at a national assembly voted in favor of the move at a national assembly of the party.
The SDS governing board recently agreed to amend the party constitution to suspend war crimes suspects from membership, including Karadzic.
However, changes in SDS statutes must also be confirmed by the majority of 387 board members, of whom 262 were present at Monday's meeting.
Prior to the vote, SDS vice president Dragan Cavic told the assembly that "all those figuring on the list of (war crimes) indictees will be automatically suspended."
Cavic voiced confidence that SDS supporters would understand the "circumstances under which we introduced those changes and back us in the future as well."
Journalists were barred from seeing a copy of the new SDS statutes.
Ahead of the vote, SDS leader Dragan Kalinic said in an interview with a Bosnian Serb magazine that the proposal to remove war crimes suspects had sparked "tough discussions" both among the party's governing board and the membership.
The move would have positive consequences for both the SDS, the most powerful party in the Bosnian Serb entity, and the entity as a whole, Kalinic told Patriot magazine.
The changes were also being brought in due to a new election law stipulating that political parties with war crimes suspects in their ranks cannot register for elections planned for October 2002, Kalinic added.
The SDS was founded in the early 1990s by Karadzic and his allies Momcilo Krajisnik and Biljana Plavsic.
Both Plavsic, the former Bosnian Serb president, and Krajisnik, former speaker of the Bosnian Serb assembly, are awaiting trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for their role in Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
The Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska (RS) is facing mounting pressure from the international community to arrest other war crimes suspects, notably Karadzic and his wartime military chief Ratko Mladic, both widely believed to reside in RS.
The pressure has increased notably after the extradition of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to the ICYT in June. Milosevic is facing genocide charges for his role in Bosnia's war, as well as charges of crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo and Croatia.
Although the Bosnian Serb parliament adopted a law on cooperation with The Hague-based tribunal three months ago, so far it proved to be only a verbal pledge since the entity still remains the only part of the former Yugoslavia which has not started to bring war crimes suspects to justice.
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