Calls For More Arrests Of Persons Indicted For War Crimes In Former Yugoslavia

American Jewish Committee
Thursday, 17 July 1997

The American Jewish Committee wholeheartedly supports the shift in policy that led to recent action against two of the leaders of the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia who had previously been indicted for complicity in genocide. We commend the British NATO troops for their action against persons charged with war crimes, and we urge that NATO peacekeeping forces move vigorously to apprehend and bring to justice all of the other indicted war criminals still at large in the area.

"This action promises, at long last, an end to the ignoble policy that left indicted war criminals on the loose," said Robert S. Rifkind, AJC President. "We now call upon President Clinton and our NATO allies to see to it that NATO forces arrest Radovan Karadzic and others who have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague. The continued failure to bring those men to justice would not only threaten the peace in Bosnia, but would undermine all our hopes for the establishment of the rule of law in Europe. Having created an international criminal court for the first time since the Nuremberg Trials, it is of the greatest importance that the members of NATO uphold its jurisdiction by taking indictees into custody."

The American Jewish Committee has taken a leading role since 1992 in calling for strong and effective international action against those responsible for perpetrating ethnic cleansing and atrocities in former Yugoslavia. Through its Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, AJC has sought to create and strengthen the international war crimes tribunal; it participated in fact-finding missions to Bosnia, has pressed US and UN officials to provide funding and adequate resources to conduct investigations, protect witnesses, and bring the perpetrators to trial; and has filed amicus briefs with the tribunal. AJC is a co-signatory to a letter to President Clinton on the second anniversary of the massacres in Srebrenica, a copy of which was published in the July 15 edition of The New York Times, calling for arrests of all of the war criminals.

For more information, or to contact American Jewish Committee, see their website at: www.ajc.org