Former Bosnian President Ejup Ganic has at last been released from a British prison

Ganic's arrest

Former Bosnian President Ejup Ganic has at last been released from a British prison to which he was sent when the British arrested him, acting on an international warrant issued by a Serbian court.

The Serbs claim that Ganic, who was briefly Bosnia's president in 1992, was responsible for the shooting of Serbian soldiers wounded when a UN-escorted convoy was ambushed as it left Sarajevo.

This charge has already been rejected by the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Nevertheless Belgrade, no doubt mindful that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is currently on trial for genocide and war crimes, has pressed ahead with its warrant. This much is perhaps predictable.

What has been unexpected, however, has been the behavior of the British authorities. Ganic had been in the UK to attend a degree ceremony at a British university that is partnered with the University of Sarajevo Science and Technology. He was arrested at Heathrow Airport as he prepared to fly home.

He was immediately taken to a London prison where initially he was denied access to lawyers, unable to contact the Bosnian ambassador and his family was forbidden from visiting him. When finally an application for bail was made in the High Court, it was turned down. Only Thursday after sureties of almost $500,000 had been posted, including a pledge from the UK university he had been visiting, was he set free. The judge, however, imposed stringent conditions including a requirement to report daily to a police station, remain at a particular address, observe a nightly curfew and not to seek new travel documents, his Bosnian passport having been seized by the British authorities.

The Serbian prosecutors now have 32 days left in which to present the evidence they have against Ganic to a British court to support their request that he be extradited to Belgrade. Given the fact that ICT investigators, who examined Belgrade's evidence, have already decided that the former Bosnian leader has no case to answer, it will be surprising if a British court finds otherwise.

The question must, therefore, be asked why the British authorities have treated Ganic so shabbily. It is one thing to stand on the letter of the law, as London always insists that it must - unless it involves attacking a sovereign state without UN backing. The British government says it is only honoring its extradition treaty obligations to the Serbs. It is, however, quite another to deny Ganic his rights and attempt to keep him locked up until Belgrade had delivered the papers in the case.

There has been understandable outrage and not just in Bosnia at the former president's treatment. The British foreign secretary Thursday met Dr. Haris Silajdzic, chairman of the presidency of Bosnia and Hercegovina in London and protested that the whole affair was a "judicial matter", over which the British government had no influence. Nevertheless within hours of that meeting Ganic had been released on bail. This happy coincidence should not, however, deflect attention from Britain's initial cavalier treatment of a widely respected statesman.

Arab News