U.N. Prosecutor Sees Breakthrough in Arrest of Serb War Crimes Suspect

Friday's arrest of a Croatian Serb ex-mayor wanted in the 1991 killing of 260 civilians in eastern Croatia marks a breakthrough in the frustrated effort by U.N. investigators in apprehending war-crimes suspects, the chief prosecutor of the U.N.-backed international tribunal said today.

The arrest of Slavko Dokmanovic, 47, brings to nine the number of suspects in the Balkan conflict indicted for war crimes and then taken into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague. Sixty-five others remain at large.

Dokmanovic's detention by tribunal investigators and U.N. peacekeepers in the Serb-held Croatian region of Eastern Slavonia was the first carried out on the territory of a former warring state without its knowledge or cooperation.

"It proves that all you need is a willing partner for the tribunal -- either a state authority or, in this case, an international one," chief prosecutor Louise Arbour said in a telephone interview today. Tribunal investigators worked in a joint operation with the U.N. Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia.

Most arrest warrants and requests for evidence have been ignored by Serb and other signatories to the 1995 Dayton accords, which require state cooperation with the four-year-old tribunal's investigations. Western stabilization forces in the region, which are also under a Dayton mandate to arrest war crimes suspects, have been criticized for looking the other way -- under orders to do so -- as the most notorious suspected war criminals move about freely.

Arbour said the secret operation against Dokmanovic, whose 15-month-old indictment by the tribunal was not previously publicized, "obviously reveals the existence of nonpublic indictments" for the first time. The public nature of the 74 known indictments, Arbour said, has hampered the tribunal's ability to hunt down suspects. From now on, she said, investigators will not announce their targets.

"I'm determined to continue to use this method for as long as I believe it will be a successful strategy," she said at a news conference in The Hague. "There is nothing tricky about arresting people without giving them advance warning. That's the way police forces operate all over the world." Asked if the Dokmanovic arrest might alert other alleged war criminals to the possibility that they are also under indictment and drive them underground, Arbour said, "It's still better than driving them underground because they know they've been indicted."

Dokmanovic was a former mayor of Vukovar, in eastern Croatia, in November 1991, when Yugoslav army and Serb paramilitary forces stormed the city's hospital and removed 260 civilian men, mostly Croats, who had taken shelter there from a Serb artillery barrage. They were taken to a nearby town, Ovcara, where they were beaten and shot to death -- with Dokmanovic's active participation, according to the indictment.

When it was uncovered by tribunal forensic experts last fall, the mass grave of 200 of the Vukovar victims stirred widespread disgust and, in Croatia, special bitterness.

The secret indictment of Dokmanovic was attached on April 3, 1996, to existing public indictments of three Yugoslav army officers also charged with responsibility for the massacre in Ovcara.

Despite outstanding arrest warrants for the three men, officials of Serbian-led Yugoslavia have refused to extradite them, saying they are constitutionally barred from doing so. Arbour again called on the Yugoslav government today to turn them over to the tribunal.