Voices of Concern for Treatment of International Political Prisoners

The vicious May 7 attack on General Radislav Krstic in Wakefield Prison is a dramatic illustration of the failure to ensure the safety of the prisoners of international tribunals.

A Serb native of Bosnia, General Krstic was sentenced to 35 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for complicity in 1995 Srebrenica massacres, although it is acknowledged that he was not directly involved in criminal executions. General Krstic repeatedly denied any knowledge of the massacres at the time, and his sentence is regarded as excessive and politically motivated by many informed observers who believe the case should be reopened.

On May 7, he was physically assaulted by three inmates identified as "Muslims". A 22-year-old ethnic Albanian named Indrit Krasniqi is reported to have slit the throat of General Krstic, narrowly missing the jugular.

Krasniqi, 22, was serving a life sentence for the gang torture and murder of a 16-year-old girl. Wakefield prison, in the north of England, is reserved especially for criminals serving long sentences for grave sex offenses.

We find it highly irresponsible of British authorities to incarcerate General Krstic, essentially a prisoner of war, in such an environment. General Krstic, 62, is slightly handicapped, having lost a leg in the Bosnian war. There is an obvious risk in imprisoning a Bosnian Serb accused of grave crimes against Muslims in a region of England with a particularly large Muslim population.  The claim that the attack was motivated by "Muslim revenge" serves as a smokescreen to cover the responsibility of British authorities.

The near-fatal attack on General Krstic comes in the wake of an extraordinary series of deaths of prisoners of the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.

We the undersigned demand:

* An official inquiry into the May 7 incident.
* The immediate transfer of General Krstic to a country able to ensure his personal safety, for example Norway.
* An end to the indifference of governments, human rights organizations and the media to the fate of prisoners of ad hoc criminal tribunals, often exaggeratedly stigmatized by the media and without the benefits of the protection afforded by judicial process in normal national courts.