BOSNIA: Officials Call For Bosnia Reform

(6/3/2002)UNITED NATIONS (March 6) - Bosnia's corrupt judicial system needs to be revamped and war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic need to be brought to justice to ensure future stability for the war-torn country, said international officials helping rebuild the country. U.N. envoy Jacques Klein told the Security Council on Tuesday that the arrest of Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader, and Ratko Mladic, his military chief, were critical for the reconciliation of Bosnia's ethnic Muslim, Croat and Serb communities. The United Nations has been helping rebuild Bosnia since 1995 under the Dayton peace agreement that ended the country's 3-year war. Karadzic is the U.N. war crimes tribunal's No. 1 suspect still at large. While the United Nations has almost completed its mission of turning Bosnia's 40,000-strong wartime militia into a 16,000-strong multiethnic police force, Klein said the country's judicial system ``remains dysfunctional.'' ``Arresting criminals is useless if they are freed by timorous or corrupt judicial officials a few hours later, and then intimidate witnesses or threaten families of police officers,'' Klein said. ``Immediate radical reform of the judiciary and prosecutors is key to everything the international community is trying to achieve in Bosnia-Herzegovina,'' he said, stressing that ``band-aid measures are not enough.'' Wolfgang Petritsch, the Austrian diplomat administering Bosnia under the Dayton agreement, told the council that policing in Bosnia ``will not be fully effective as long as there is a belief that certain individuals are beyond the reach of the law.'' He accused the Bosnian Serb republic, which comprises just under half the country, of failing to live up to its obligations to arrest Karadzic, Mladic and others indicted for war crimes. The U.S. State Department has offered a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture Karadzic. Petritsch said he presented ``a reinvigorated program of judicial reform'' last week following an ``alarming'' independent assessment that found the judicial system poorly financed and courts often subject ``to undue external influence.'' Petritsch said his reform package includes a restructuring of the courts, reform of key laws including codes of civil and criminal procedures, a ``depoliticized'' appointment procedure and creation of a High Judicial Council.

//Shqiptarja.com

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