Vocabulary University® A-to-Z Vocabulary Word Lists
Killing the SS - The Hunt for the Worst War Criminals in History (Bill O'Reilly) at Booksamillion.com. Confronting Nazi evil is the subject of the latest installment in the mega-bestselling Killing series As the true horrors of the Third Reich began to be exposed immediately after World War II, the Nazi war criminals who committed genocide went. The Hunt: Me and the War Criminals ( Italian: La caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra ) is a book written by Carla Del Ponte, published in April 2008. According to Del Ponte she received information saying about 300 Serbs were kidnapped and transferred to Albania in 1999 where their organs were extracted.
Q: How can I use 660 word lists from https://myvocabulary.com/?'
A: Suggestions for usage for teachers, parents, students and life-long learners!
- Choose 15-25 words that are unknown to you from the list provided. Look up and write down the definition, part of speech and use the new word in a sentence of more than 6 words. Practice using the new word.
- Write a story, postcard, letter or create a journal entry using 15-25 words in context.
- Working in pairs or in a group, pair synonyms and/or antonyms: list words as adjectives, nouns and/or verbs.
- Choose 10-15 nouns, verbs or adjectives from a list. List them: define each one to make a sentence of at least six words.
- Play a game: how many additional words can you add to a list? If you like, we are happy to give you credit for your supplementary words using your initials and school name, city and state/country! Just email us More Words!
- Don't forget to visit the School Content Calendar for more thematic ideas.
The man who walked into a forest clearing in northern Serbia did not look like a wartime leader who had spent seven years on the run. There was no face paint or camouflage – just a chubby, balding man in a sky blue T-shirt decorated with what appeared to be a modernist rendering of an ice-cream cone.
It is hard to imagine a more perfect embodiment of the banality of evil. The man in the forest was Goran Hadžíc, the leader of Croatia's Serb minority during the Balkan wars of the 90s. The former warehouse worker is charged with playing a leading role in the destruction of the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991 – the first time a major European town had been destroyed since the second world war. It was carried out with a barbarity reminiscent of the Nazi era. At least 264 Croats and other non-Serbs were taken from Vukovar hospital to a nearby pig farm and tortured before being shot and dumped in a mass grave.
Before his capture on 20 July, Hadžíc had spent seven of the past 20 years living under a false name in Russia, where he was hidden by diehard ultra-nationalist priests who still populate the Serb Orthodox church. But he started running out of money, and it was his apparent desperate attempt to flog a Modigliani portrait (it is so far unclear whether it was real or forged, or whether he even owned such a portrait) that got him noticed by the Belgrade authorities, who put a 24-hour tail on the contacts they thought he might go to for help.
On 20 July, Hadžíc broke cover to collect some cash from a friend in some heavily wooded hills in an area of the northern Vojvodina, where many of his relatives live. As the meeting began, Serbian commandos emerged from the undergrowth in black balaclavas and surrounded them. There is some dispute over whether Hadžíc was armed, but in any case he did not resist, meekly admitting his identity as he gave himself up.
The arrest was a pathetic and long-overdue finale to the age of the Balkan warlord. Of the 161 war crimes suspects indicted by the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Hadžíc's court appearance in The Hague last month, besuited and glumly responding to the South Korean judge, marked the end of a hunt that began with the tribunal's creation in 1993.
It has been a long time coming, but with every name now crossed off the list of Hague indictees, it has arguably been the most successful manhunt in history. The search for the former Yugoslavia's war criminals involved the US National Security Agency's latest spy satellites at one end of the technological scale and, at the other, a couple of SAS soldiers lying in a trench for weeks watching their quarry.
It involved subterfuge, counter-subterfuge and car chases straight out of The Italian Job. It is a story that unwound in the shadows cast by the Balkan conflict, and which has been largely untold. With the Hague hit-list now behind bars or dead, the details are only just coming to light and some of the diplomats and soldiers who have talked to the Guardian were speaking about the hunt for the first time.
The tribunal for the former Yugoslavia – and its twin for Rwanda – represents the first concerted attempt to deal with crimes against humanity since the Nuremberg trials after the second world war. Unlike the purely victor's justice at those trials, the UN tribunal sought to hold to account all parties to the Yugoslav horror. And while Nuremberg missed Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann, The Hague finished the job. On top of that, the ex-Yugoslav and Rwandan tribunals have paved the way for the creation of a permanent tribunal for judging mass murder, the International Criminal Court (ICC).
None of these achievements was pre-ordained or even seemed likely when the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in 1993, largely as a sop to the western conscience at the height of the Bosnian war, in lieu of actual intervention. It was then promptly ignored by those who had created it.
Even after the worst atrocity in Europe since 1945, the Serb massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, there was no international effort to bring the perpetrators to justice. Those primarily responsible, President Slobodan Miloševic of Serbia and the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadžic and Ratko Mladic, all acted as if the court in The Hague did not exist. So too did the world powers whose long-awaited intervention helped bring the war to an end. The immediate focus of the world's diplomats was hammering out a peace deal in Dayton, Ohio.
In the summer of 1996, months after the Dayton peace agreement was signed, little had changed. Karadžic was able to drive across Bosnia, through four international checkpoints, waving insouciantly at the Nato troops on guard, whose orders – dictated by a nervous Clinton administration – all but precluded them from taking action. 'The rules of engagement said in effect: 'Don't pick him up, unless you actually trip over him,' recalls Charles Crawford, who was UK ambassador to Bosnia at the time. 'Anything that involved going off the road even 10 yards was regarded as 'not being in the course of your normal duties'.'
In April 1996, just before being sent to Sarajevo as ambassador, Crawford attended a meeting in the magnificent map room at the Foreign Office, at which the issue was not whether to arrest Karadžic but whether to let his party run in the coming post-Dayton elections. 'The Brits and other Europeans were wriggling about banning the autumn election posters of Karadžic and Mladic, saying it's all very difficult,' Crawford says. 'I thought it was ghastly. The Europeans were evincing a disconcerting feebleness, brooding on the supposed downsides of being tough. The Americans were saying we were dealing with a bunch of hillbillies and we had 70,000 troops. The Americans won the argument hands down.'
In fact, the Americans were keener on the Europeans arresting war criminals than they were on doing it themselves. Clinton was fearful any US casualties could cost him his re-election in November 1996. It was the US president who had insisted on the restrictive rules of engagement for Sfor, the Nato 'stabilisation' force in Bosnia.
But the US special envoy to the Balkans, Richard Holbrooke, saw it as American humiliation. In June 1996, he wrote to the president: 'The implications of Karadžic's defiance go far beyond Bosnia itself. If he succeeds, basic issues of American leadership that seemed settled in the public's eye after Dayton will re-emerge. Having reasserted American leadership in Europe, it would be a tragedy if we let it slip away again.'
It was only once Clinton had secured his re-election, and appointed Madeleine Albright – a former refugee from Nazi Europe who insisted US military might should be used to prevent a repeat of such atrocities – that Washington began to focus seriously on catching war criminals.
And as the war criminals' impunity grew more and more blatant, several British officials came round to the same point of view. Towards the end of 1996, Crawford wrote a telegram from Sarajevo to the head of the Foreign Office's Balkan desk, in which he recalls arguing: 'We have to arrest these people and pull out the poison, because we can't expect the Bosnians to take us seriously if they think these people are still running the show. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.'
In the last months of John Major's government, steps were taken to prepare for action. War crimes suspects in British-occupied western Bosnia, who had been named in sealed indictments issued by the tribunal, began to be shadowed by the SAS. Lawyers drew up detailed procedures for handing captives over to The Hague, under which an ICTY doctor and lawyer would be on hand for each arrest. But it was left to Tony Blair's new Labour government, elected in May 1997, to give the green light to the first capture operation. 'Blair, and [foreign secretary Robin] Cook in particular, were much more forward and much more willing to take risks in the name of stability and morality than their predecessors had been,' recalls a senior European diplomat.
The first war-crimes arrests in former Yugoslavia were carried out on 10 July 1997 in an operation codenamed Tango. For the preceding four weeks it had involved SAS soldiers lying in a shallow trench beside a lake near the town of Prijedor, watching a man called Simo Drljaca. During the war, Drljaca had been Prijedor's police chief, and had organised the 'ethnic cleansing' of the town's Muslims, who were driven into a string of horrific concentration camps at Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje. Many of the inmates were beaten or starved to death.
In peacetime retirement, Drljaca had relaxed, spending a lot of time fishing at the lake, and on this particular summer morning he had brought along his son and brother-in-law, unaware that his impunity had run its course.
In the clipped account of one British official: 'It was a hardcore SAS operation. The SAS came out of the undergrowth saying: 'We are here to arrest you.' Drljaca pulled out a pistol and fired at them and they shot him.'
At exactly the same time, another SAS team entered Prijedor hospital, posing as Red Cross officials, and arrested its director, Milan Kovacevic, who as the town's wartime mayor had given the orders for the round-up of Muslims. Kovacevic did not resist and within a few minutes found himself on a helicopter bound for a US army base, on the first leg of a journey to The Hague.
Operation Tango triggered an outcry. The Serbs accused the British of executing Drljaca in cold blood, and the Muslim government in Sarajevo, somewhat perversely, accused Cook, on his first visit to the region, of deliberately creating a martyr as part of a 'pro-Serb' plot. But, crucially, Tango did not spark the feared conflagration. 'What Prijedor did was show it could be done. And the blowback was not as bad as people had thought,' a senior European diplomat says. The US, German, Dutch and French contingents in Sfor started carrying out their own capture operations and the restrictive rules of engagement, ignored anyway by the SAS in Operation Tango, were relaxed, allowing the troops to go hunting for suspects.
Chastened by Drljaca's fate, the likely targets in the British zone went to ground. The next SAS operation, codenamed Ensue, did not take place until September 1998, when a team crossed into Serbia and grabbed a suspect called Stevan Todorovic – wanted for war crimes in the town of Bosanski Samac – in a log cabin hideaway in the middle of a forest. According to Todorovic's lawyer, whose account was privately confirmed by a British official, Todorovic was bound and hooded and bundled into a car, and then taken over the Drina river on a rubber Zodiac boat, into Bosnia, before being extradited to The Hague.
While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding. In fact, Sfor officers remained discreetly in touch with Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, on the grounds that – in the words of one British official – he was still 'honcho numero uno' in the military and could therefore deliver results.
Back in Sarajevo, Crawford, the British ambassador, offered to drive to the nearby Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale to try to talk Karadžic into giving himself up. 'There was a chance that, speaking to him in Serbian, I might have got him to sit down and think about it and maybe just surrender. Maybe a slim chance, but a chance worth taking,' he says. Cook thought it was a good idea, but submitted the plan to the US secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who overruled him.
The Americans had their own plans for Karadžic and were at that time putting together an operation to seize him. But the operation was abruptly called off when it was leaked to the Bosnian Serb leader. US officials quickly blamed the French, and in particular a dashing and aristocratic young major called Hervé Gourmelon, who was discovered to be holding secret meetings with Karadžic.
Gourmelon, who has since retired from the army, could not be reached for comment. The defence ministry in Paris said at the time he had been part of an independent French bid to persuade Karadžic to surrender quietly. Ministry officials denied he had given away the US plan but swiftly transferred him back to France because his contacts 'might have appeared questionable'.
The Gourmelon affair drove a deep rift between Paris and Washington, and the Americans started conducting their own operations in the French zone of control without telling their distrusted allies. On one such operation in 2002, Karadžic's wife opened her door at one o'clock in the morning to find a group of US special forces soldiers in balaclavas, led by an urbane major general in a beret asking politely if they might come in for tea. The major general was David Petraeus, later US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan and now soon to start work as the head of the CIA. He was doing what his officers called his 'Eddie Murphy routine' after the role Murphy played in the movie 48 Hrs as a convict who used a broad smile and easy charm to go after a ruthless murderer.
It worked in the movie, but not in real life. Ljiljana Karadžic turned out to be a match for the future spy-chief and his men. The night-time visit, and others that followed, were intended to rattle her into making contact with her husband while under constant surveillance by satellites, aircraft and ground reconnaissance teams. But she took elaborate precautions against being followed. On one occasion, a former Sfor officer recalls: 'We saw her bags go out in front of her house. A black Audi drew up and she got in. We followed her but she went into a covered car-park while we waited outside. Six different black Audis, all the same, came out. She was in one of them, but we couldn't follow them all and we lost her.'
The Nato hunting teams tried everything they could think of to pick up the trail. They looked out for satellite dishes on houses in remote locations and found out who was subscribing to Belgrade newspapers in out-of-the-way villages, on the grounds that war crimes suspects would have a greater appetite for news of the outside world than their country neighbours.
It was all to no avail. Sfor had picked up some of the low-hanging fruit, but those suspects with connections to the governments in Belgrade and Zagreb found havens among their friends and sponsors there. Nato, meanwhile, was drawing down its troops in the Balkans and the war crimes operations were handed over to the intelligence agencies, who could watch their quarry but had to rely on the deeply unreliable Serbian and Croatian governments to carry out arrests.
Ultimately, it took a political upheaval to bring any real progress. Miloševic was overthrown in October 2000 and handed over to The Hague the following June by the man who replaced him, Zoran Djindjic, in a dramatic, fatal, gamble that the west's gratitude would outweigh the hatred of his fellow Serbs. What is less well known is that Djindjic simultaneously offered the British the opportunity to grab Mladic.
War Criminals Bush
'On the night Miloševic went to The Hague in 2001, the Serbs invited us to send out a team to get Mladic, saying they reckoned they knew where he was,' says Crawford, who by that time was serving as the UK ambassador in Belgrade. ' My conclusion, as the guy on the spot, was I didn't think it would be wise. We of course put the offer to London. But it would have meant SAS people getting on a plane and flying straight out; I didn't think it right to put British soldiers into a dangerous situation where they could not know for sure what was going to be happening or whom to trust.' At about the same time, the Americans also believed they had a chance to seize Mladic. A US officer says: 'He was in a military compound in Belgrade, and we had a fix on it. We gave real-time intelligence to Djindjic but it leaked.'
The window of opportunity offered by Djindjic's pro-western leadership closed abruptly in March 2003, when the prime minister was shot dead by a sniper working for an unholy alliance of organised crime and former Serbian intelligence officers outraged by his willingness to co-operate with The Hague. With his death, power shifted to the Serbian president, Vojislav Koštunica, a democrat but also a nationalist who proved far less willing to help hunt down Mladic and Karadžic.
The Hague tribunal switched tactics, however, and started exerting intense diplomatic pressure. The court's tough, outspoken chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general, made sure the EU would not entertain Serbian or Croatian bids for membership unless she certified that their governments were fully co-operating with The Hague. In her autobiography, Madame Prosecutor, Del Ponte complains she constantly ran into what she termed the 'muro di gomma' or rubber wall, in seeking western support. George Tenet, the CIA chief, even told her: 'I don't give a shit what you think.'
Serge Brammertz, Del Ponte's successor, kept up the pressure until he came face to face with Hadžíc in the Hague courtroom last month. 'Unfortunately the truth is, without pressure, things do not really move forward,' Brammertz tells the Guardian. 'Linking EU enlargement to the arrest of the fugitives has been a really successful tool in the past, and has been instrumental in the arrests of the fugitives of the last years.'
The pressure eventually forced the government in Zagreb to hand over intelligence that led Interpol and the Spanish police to catch the highest ranking Croatian war crimes suspect, General Ante Gotovina, holed up in a luxury hotel in the Canary Islands in December 2005. It also led to the election in 2008 of a new pro-western leader in Serbia, Boris Tadic. His appointment of a young new head of the country's intelligence service, the BIA, Saša Vukadinovic, and the subsequent purge of old ultra-nationalist officers, brought near instant results.
Wanted War Criminals
Two weeks after Vukadinovic took charge, Karadžic was picked up in Belgrade, where he had been posing as a new-age healer. Mladic was tracked down in May, old and destitute and demanding his pension in the outhouse at his cousin's home in northern Serbia.
Justice is finally being delivered, but it has taken 18 years since the ICTY was established. During that time, many thousands of victims were killed and 10 Hague indictees cheated justice by dying before they were caught.
'We are pleased that at the end of the day they were all arrested, but was it really necessary that it took so long, and was so painful?' says Brammertz. 'Many of the survivors of the crimes in the meantime died without seeing justice being done. So I share the frustration.' But he does not agree that justice delayed has been justice denied. As well as paving the way for a permanent war crimes court, the ICC, he said The Hague tribunal had struck a firm blow against a culture of impunity in the western Balkans and beyond.
Japanese War Criminals
'It is clear that without the tribunal, those who bear the greatest responsibility would never have been prosecuted,' he says. 'I don't think that, without the tribunal, there would now be a database of 7m documents which very clearly gives the history of the conflict, so that no one can deny that crimes have taken place and that genocide has been committed.'
Nazi War Criminals
• This article was amended on 5 August 2011 because the original said Nuremberg missed Martin Bormann, when it should have said Josef Mengele.