Karadzic vows 'no surrender'

Karadzic expects his autobiography to be a bestseller

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Suspected Bosnian Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has vowed he will never go to prison and predicted he is in line for a Nobel prize.

Karadzic made the statements to a reporter of the Mostar-based Danas weekly.

The reporter was led blindfolded to meet the former war leader in a Serb-controlled village in the southern Herzegovina region.

Karadzic has been indicted twice by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague along with his wartime military chief Ratko Mladic.

Despite the secrecy surrounding Karadzic's location, he said: "I am not in hiding at all, my people are hiding me. You can ask any Serb if he would betray Radovan Karadzic...I walk around normally, go to baptism ceremonies, associate with my friends and my soldiers, I have recently been even in Sarajevo."

"I will not fall into their hands alive," he added, in what appeared to be his first public comments since he was forced to resign from politics in July 1996 under international pressure.

"Although if I knew my surrender would benefit the Serb people and their interests, I would do it immediately," he said.

"But it would be absurd to surrender to those who have killed Serb children and the elderly. And it would be even more stupid to believe that tribunal would be unbiased."

The chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, said last week during a visit to Bosnia she wanted the arrest of all 38 people publicly indicted and still at large.

Karadzic was a priority, she added.

Danas said Karadzic was finishing an autobiography called "Radovan and Serbia" to be published by a Western publisher later this year.

Karadzic predicted the "book will become a bestseller, and I'm sure even be proposed for the Nobel prize."

The book is to shed new light on the role of Yugoslavia's ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, who backed Bosnian Serbs in their fight to carve out an ethnically pure Serb state but then distanced himself from them in 1995, Karadzic added.

"My book will explain many things and it will cast a dark shadow over Slobodan Milosevic. I will never forgive him, and neither will the Serb people, for the fact that he set up borders between Serbia and Bosnian Serbs," he said.

The U.S. has offered a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to the arrests of Karadzic and Mladic.

"Don't even dare to try and use this interview to earn these millions offered by those international fools," he warned the reporter in his farewell remarks.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Srebrenica survivors in U.N. protest
April 2, 2001
Bosnia urged to hand over Karadzic
March 27, 2001
War crimes chief eyes Karadzic
February 14, 2001
Bosnia's Plavsic denies war crimes
January 11, 2001

International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
DANAS

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