Catch me if you can: if snaring Saddam was so important, why is Radovan Karadzic allowed to remain free?

• Author: Baker, Russ

Celebici is a remote gnat of a place. A few dozen houses and a church, a couple of hours up a rough road from the ragged Bosnian hills, surrounded by forested peaks. But it was as big as the headlines it generated when NATO-led forces staged Operation Daybreak there in February 2002, ostensibly hoping to net Radovan Karadzic, the still-at-large Bosnian Serb leader who had been indicted by the Hague's War Crimes Tribunal for helping lead a genocide in 1992-1995 that killed up to 200,000, mostly Bosnian Muslims. Helicopters disgorged black-masked troops who kicked in doors and blew open locks as they conducted a door-to-door search. They left empty-handed. Operation Daybreak remains the only serious action the West is known to have conducted to pick up Karadzic.

The international peacekeeping troops, known as SFOR, maintain an ongoing interest in Celebici. They reappeared the day after the initial February raid, and then again that summer--which seems a little strange since even if he was once there, Karadzic was hardly likely to return to a place that's already under such scrutiny. During my visit, villagers were initially wary, but ended up sharing salami and a cheese spread called kajmak with me, and talking freely about their life in a fishbowl. Withing half an hour of my arrival, almost on cue, an SFOR vehicle entered the village and parked by the tiny church. But when I chatted up the German officers inside, they turned out to be on what certainly looked more like a sightseeing tour than a sophisticated operation, even if getting to Celebici takes some resolve and a lot of bouncing up a challenging path. They admitted to me that most SFOR troops know very little about Bosnia, and are hardly equipped for, or looking forward to, a vigorons action of the sort necessary to bag Karadzic. After talking with locals and Western officials in Bosnia, I started to suspect that the troops still hang around Celebici because they don't have any more current idea of where Karadzic might be.

Five years ago, Karadzic's capture seemed imminent. In 1998, the-then international High Representative to Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, declared that Karadzic's power base was shrinking rapidly and that he probably would surrender within a month. Elisabeth Rehn, the U.N. envoy to Bosnia, said she suspected Karadzic would be in the Hague "quite soon" Like Osama bin Laden, Karadzic is well-known and physically distinctive: A tall man with a big belly, a dimpled chin, and a dramatic gray bouffant, he ought to be difficult to hide. But for a seeming eternity, he's eluded some of the most technologically sophisticated man-hunting teams in the country. Now, with American intelligence drained from the area to support the military in Iraq, the prospects for his capture look dimmer than ever. The evidence suggests that Americans and their Western allies have simply given up the hunt.

One really shouldn't engage in atrocity one-upmanship, but it's arguable that compared with such more famous current and recent fugitives as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, Karadzic, wins the odiousness sweepstakes. A remarkably public front man for genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the disarmingly avuncular Bosnian Serb leader dispensed lies to packed press conferences while his soldiers laid siege to Sarajevo (where he previously worked at the main hospital) and went village to village, locking families inside houses and setting them afire, bringing women to detention camps where they could be mass-raped. Along with his general and fellow fugitive Ratko Mladic, Karadzic is accused of responsibility for all manner of atrocity, most notably the 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N. safe area of Srebrenica, the single worst crime committed in Europe since World War II.

Now that U.S. troops have captured Saddam Hussein, and the Bush administration has trumpeted that capture as both a justification for the war and a key step toward winning the peace, it has become logically impossible to justify why Radovan Karadzic is allowed to roam free. Like Saddam, he is a genocidal murderer. Like Saddam, his most horrible crimes were committed a decade...