Comparing the Bin Laden Chase to Others
May 16 -- There's no question who the world's most-wanted fugitive is these days.
Before Osama bin Laden, though, two other men topped that notorious list — and even though they were indicted almost seven years ago, they have still not been caught.
The two are Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb leader and his former military commander, who are accused of overseeing the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which 6,000 civilians were killed.
Bin Laden, by contrast, is held responsible for more than 3,000 deaths on Sept. 11 last year and in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
Karadzic and Mladic are considered responsible for the worst single atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II. Like bin Laden's alleged attacks around the world, their crime was allegedly intended as an act of terror.
The joint indictment against Karadzic and Mladic says Serb troops under their orders "unlawfully fired on civilian gatherings that were of no military significance in order to kill, terrorize and demoralize the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat civilian population."
It's been eight months since the Sept. 11 attacks, and despite the aggressive pursuit of bin Laden by authorities around the world, he has not been caught.
The hunt for bin Laden is starting to echo the hunt for Mladic and Karadzic in its fruitlessness, and the designation "most-wanted fugitive in the world" appears to be losing currency and priority.
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Bin Laden and Karadzic and Mladic have escaped the clutches of international justice in similar manners.
When Karadzic and Mladic were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1996, they fled into areas where they had close ethnic ties — Mladic to the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade, and Karadzic to Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia.
Bin Laden has also sought refuge in areas of the globe that share his world view. In 1991, he went to Sudan from his native Saudi Arabia after he angered the Saudi government over his criticisms of its alliance with the United States.
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