What did Holbrooke tell Karadzic?

It’s the rumor that continues to haunt U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke: that in 1996 he promised then Bosnian Serb leader, now genocide defendent Radovan Karadzic that he would never face prosecution. Karadzic makes the claim every time he appears in court — claiming that Holbrooke offered him the deal in exchange for stepping ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.
587533_090323_holbrooke2.jpg
587533_090323_holbrooke2.jpg
US envoy Richard Holbrooke talks during a meeting with unseen Afghan foreign minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta at the foreign ministry in Kabul on February 14, 2009. US envoy Richard Holbrooke was due to meet President Hamid Karzai on the second full day of a visit to Afghanistan to assess US-led efforts to tackle a Taliban-led insurgency. AFP PHOTO/Massoud HOSSAINI (Photo credit should read MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images)

It's the rumor that continues to haunt U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke: that in 1996 he promised then Bosnian Serb leader, now genocide defendent Radovan Karadzic that he would never face prosecution.

It’s the rumor that continues to haunt U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke: that in 1996 he promised then Bosnian Serb leader, now genocide defendent Radovan Karadzic that he would never face prosecution.

Karadzic makes the claim every time he appears in court — claiming that Holbrooke offered him the deal in exchange for stepping down after the Bosnian war — but he hasn’t been taken to seriously. Now, it seems some others are talking:

Two of the people cited anonymously in the new study, a former senior State Department official who spent almost a decade in the Balkans and another American who was involved with international peacekeeping there in the 1990s, provided additional details in interviews with The New York Times, speaking on condition that they not be further identified.

The former State Department official said he had been told of the offer by people who were close to Mr. Holbrooke’s team at the time. The other person said Mr. Holbrooke had personally and emphatically told him about the deal on two occasions.

While the two men agreed, as one of them put it, that “Holbrooke did the right thing and got the job done,” the recurring story of the deal has dogged Mr. Holbrooke.

Holbrooke continues to deny that any such deal was ever made. Here’s what he had to say in a “Seven Questions” interview with FP from right after Karadzic’s arrest:

Let me just say that Karadzic should have been captured in the first few months after [the signing of the] Dayton [Peace Accords], in early 1996. Even though everybody knew where he was, he was not brought to justice because the NATO commander, Adm. Leighton Smith, failed to exercise his authority. Smith said it was not a mission of his command, which was a terrible thing to do. Had Karadzic been arrested back then, the history of the Balkans would have been much easier during the last 13 years, because Karadzic wouldn’t have been able to actively try and undermine political stability and reconciliation in the Balkans. 

MASSOUD HOSSAINI/AFP/Getty Images

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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