Comparing the Bin Laden Chase to Others

May 16, 2002 -- 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.

Survival Strategies

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.

As demands for their capture grew, both bin Laden and Karadzic and Mladic moved to areas where the international justice community had even less authority.

When Karadzic and Mladic's one-time mentor, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, fell from power in April 2001, the two moved. They are both believed to have sought refuge in the hostile mountainous environment of eastern Bosnia.

When Sudan faced international pressure over bin Laden's presence in 1996, he slipped out to Afghanistan, which was then ruled by the hard-line Islamic Taliban regime. At the time, the Taliban rule was recognized by just three countries.

And when the United State began to pursue him aggressively in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, and his Taliban protectors were overthrown, bin Laden purportedly moved to an even more anarchic land. According to some claims, he is in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, where even Pakistan's army fears to tread.

The three men have also been able to escape international justice because of their ability to command loyalty and funds. They are all believed to be guarded by loyal troops, bolstered by hefty stores of funds.

There are also fears about the implications of an arrest attempt on any of these men. An action against bin Laden might spur fundamentalist Muslims to action, as much as any actions against Karadzic or Mladic might do the same for Serb nationalists.

A Matter of Caring

However, experts said as similar as these two fugitive hunts are, there are no guarantees that the hunt for bin Laden will end up as hamstrung as the one for the two Serbs.

"Every fugitive case is different. It's really hard to compare," said Larry Barcella, a former federal prosecutor and participant in some of the major international fugitive hunts of the past 30 years.

He was involved in pursuing the killers of Orlando Latelier, a former Chilean foreign minister who was assassinated in Washington in 1976, and the hijackers of TWA Flight 847, who in 1985 killed a U.S. Navy diver and dumped his body on the tarmac of Beirut International Airport in Lebanon. Both cases remain unresolved.

One of the major issues is commitment. "Do political powers want to risk lives, money, political capital to accomplish their goals?" asked Allison Danner, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School in Tennessee.

In the case of Afghanistan and bin Laden, the answer appears to be yes, she said. "It's clear the U.S., the British, the Canadians are unified in their desire to get him."

There's also a willingness to get bin Laden in any condition. On Sept. 17, six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush said: "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West, I recall, that says, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.' "

By contrast, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia wants Karadzic and Mladic alive for trial — but it has very limited authority.

For example, the ICTY only managed to bring Milosevic to justice after Yugoslav authorities arrested him on corruption charges and the international aid community threatened to withhold development funds if he was not turned over to the court in The Hague, Netherlands.

As a result, the ICTY has had to rely on the NATO-led Stablization Force — which is made up of contingents from various countries, some of whom may have sympathy for Karadzic and Mladic. The last attempt to grab Karadzic in February allegedly failed because of a tipoff from a sympathetic French soldier.

Black and White or Shades of Gray?

Most significantly, experts point out that the balance of power often plays into how a fugitive pursuit is executed. In Bosnia, much of the delay has been due to the international community's fear that an arrest might upset the delicate power-sharing arrangement there.

"If they could get [Karadzic and Mladic] without creating an uproar, I'm sure they'd do it in a New York minute," said Steve Garrett, an expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California."But it's not that simple."

Fugitive hunts are less complicated where there is no delicate balance of power to consider. Authorities have had less trouble snatching fugitives implicated in the Rwandan genocide — the focus of the only other international criminal court — because there was a clear victor in that conflict.

There is a clear victor in Afghanistan war — so the balance of power won't stand in the way of bringing bin Laden to justice, experts say. And as far as the potential uproar that might come from his supporters in the event of his arrest — there are ways of avoiding that, too.

"That guy's never going to see the inside of a court," Garrett said.