Did Chirac protect war criminal?

last updated 8 January 2015

Paris

French President Jacques Chirac struck a deal to block the arrest of Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb responsible for genocide, in exchange for the release of two French pilots, according to evidence presented at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague this week. At the trial of deposed Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, former Yugoslav president Zoran Lilic said that in 1995, Chirac gave Mladic a guarantee that he wouldn’t be sent to the tribunal, and Mladic released the two hostages. Mladic is the top criminal still at large from the Yugoslav wars. He is wanted for ordering the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N. “safe haven” of Srebrenica. Chirac dismissed the allegations as lies and “hearsay.”