Good & Bad War Criminals

Consortium News
Volume 30, Number 1— Wednesday, January 1, 2025


Good & Bad War Criminals

December 24, 2024


Tony Blair sent special forces to hunt down suspected Bosnian war criminals in the 1990s who were accused of lesser abuses than Netanyahu and Gallant, writes Mark Curtis.

Protester near London’s Savoy Hotel where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was staying and dining during his controversial visit in March 2023 . (Alisdaire Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

By Mark Curtis
Declassified UK

Very little is known about Operation Tango, a secret Special Air Service (SAS) mission to capture suspected war criminals in Bosnia in 1997.

It was one of several clandestine special forces missions ordered by Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in support of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

This had been set up in 1993 to try suspects for gruesome crimes committed during the conflicts in the Balkans.

One man believed to have been seized by the SAS was Vlatko Kupreskic, a Bosnian Croat soldier who was accused of involvement in murder.

After the SAS captured Kupreskic he was removed to The Hague and initially sentenced to six years in prison. But in an appeal the following year Kupreskic was found not guilty and released.

The tribunal judges found there was insufficient evidence to convict Kupreskic for aiding and abetting an attack that killed Muslim residents of the village of Ahmici in central Bosnia in April 1993.

The crimes of which Kupreskic was accused were certainly serious. But, along with several other figures captured by the SAS in the late 1990s, they were less extensive than those currently levelled against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin with Netanyahu and Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. (DoD, Chad J. McNeeley, CC BY 2.0)


Judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) believe that both Netanyahu and Gallant “bear criminal responsibility” for seven categories of “war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

They say there are reasonable grounds to suspect that both Netanyahu and Gallant have “committed the war crime of using starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

They are also accused of “intentionally directing attacks against civilians.” These policies have surely affected tens of thousands, if not more, Palestinians.

Far from sending in the SAS, the U.K. government is equivocating on whether it would even arrest the Israelis if they entered Britain, while the Conservative opposition thinks the ICC has no right to accuse them at all.

Behind Enemy Lines

Building where the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was held in Scheveningen, The Hague. (Julian Ny?a, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)


Another figure captured by the SAS was Stevan Todorovic, who was seized in September 1998.

The U.K. Ministry of Defence was so determined to arrest Todorovic that it ordered the SAS to carry out this operation inside Serbia itself.

The territory was then still under the control of Slobodan Milosevic, whose policies sparked the Bosnian war and who later became the first sitting head of state charged with war crimes.

Todorovic, the police chief in Bosanski Šamac in north-eastern Bosnia, was removed to The Hague and later sentenced by the Tribunal to 10 years in prison.

His crimes included beating a man who died as a result of this mistreatment, repeatedly beating seven other men over a period of eight months, and ordering three individuals over whom he had superior responsibility to torture a man.

According to the U.K. Elite Forces website,


“On the night of the 27th of September, 1998, the 4-man SAS team, all fluent Serb speakers, stormed Todorovic’s cabin. He was bound, gagged and put into a 4×4 and driven to the Drina River, close to the border with Bosnia.

“Once at the river, the SAS loaded Todorovic into a Zodiac-style inflatable boat and took him across and over the border where he was bundled into a waiting helicopter and flown to Tuzla for formal arrest.”


Others captured by the SAS were Anto Furundzija, a Bosnian Croat commander who was sentenced to 10 years for involvement in torture, and Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic.

He was sentenced to life in prison for conducting sniping and shelling attacks on the city of Sarajevo. These attacks, killing hundreds of men and women, were part of the siege of Bosnia’s capital, which some have compared to the situation in Gaza.

Putin

Three of the Russian individuals indicted by the ICC, from left: Valery Gerasimov, President Vladimir Putin and Sergei Shoigu, September 2021. (Kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)


Whitehall’s weak reaction to ICC arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant stands in contrast to the exertions it made towards the former Yugoslavia and, more recently, Russia.

When the ICC announced an arrest warrant for Russian ruler Vladimir Putin in March 2023, the U.K. increased funding to the organisation and hosted an international conference in London.

“The ICC plays a vital role in global efforts to end impunity for war crimes,” the U.K. Ministry of Justice said.

A year earlier the U.K. had galvanised a group of governments to refer Russian atrocities in Ukraine to the ICC to enable it to proceed straight to an investigation — a process known as “state party referral.”

David Lammy, [member of Parliament at the time], described the ICC’s arrest warrant for Putin as “an historic step,” adding that “President Putin is now a wanted man.”

By contrast, Lammy now, as the current foreign secretary, has only grudgingly conceded that, in the cases of Netanyahu and Gallant, “there is an obligation on me to transmit to the courts should those named seek to come in to our country”.

When in 2006 former Liberian President Charles Taylor was undergoing a war crimes trial in The Hague for aiding rebels in Sierra Leone notorious for hacking off limbs of civilians, the British government offered to house him in a U.K. jail if convicted.

Sentenced to 50 years imprisonment, Taylor began serving his conviction at HMP Frankland near Durham. It seems inconceivable that Netanyahu and Gallant will ever see the inside of a British jail.

Mark Curtis is the director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.

This article is from Declassified UK.