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By Laura Rozen
Dec. 21, 1999 | Among the legions of diplomats, aid workers,
journalists and soldiers who came to postwar Sarajevo, Col.
Herve Gormillon seemed a benign and unremarkable figure, a
man who followed orders. He turned out not to be.
The slightly-built French NATO officer, a regular fixture at
NATO's daily press conferences at Sarajevo's Holiday Inn in the
months following the end of the Bosnian war, turned out to be the
perfect spy -- until he got caught passing NATO's arrest plans to
top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, the
man many hold responsible for the worst crimes of the Bosnian
war. Gormillon had apparently been meeting secretly with
Karadzic, in his stronghold of Pale, for months, passing secrets.
Gormillon's treachery forced NATO to scrap their arrest plans.
Already fearing casualties, NATO commanders killed the plan
once they realized Gormillon had destroyed their chief advantage
against the heavily-guarded Karadzic: The element of surprise.
NATO Commander General Wesley Clark said "he would never
trust the French again" after the Gormillon incident, according to
one former NATO official who asked not to be named.
To this day, Karadzic remains free, along with some two dozen
other Serb war crime suspects. Most reportedly live in the
French-controlled sector of southeastern Bosnia.
"The French have a blind spot when Serbs are involved," said Jim
Hooper, director of the Balkan Action Council, a Washington
advocacy group. "Karadzic moves around their sector openly.
The guy has a guard force of 100 people. When you have that
many guards, it makes it virtually impossible that the French
troops don't know where he is, don't intercept their radio
communications. It's very hard to hide 100 people, especially in
an area that small. I mean, we're not talking about Alaska."
While British troops stationed in northern and western Bosnia
have carried out arrests of 12 war crimes suspects, the latest on
Monday of Bosnian Serb general Stanislav Galic in Banja Luka,
French troops have attempted only one arrest. That ended in the
killing of Dragan Gagavic, a suspect who had moved freely
around the southeastern Bosnian Serb city of Foca in plain sight
of French troops for months and who was reportedly close to
giving himself up. French troops say they shot Gagavic because
he looked ready to hit them with his car, which was full of girls he
was bringing back from a judo tournament.
The Americans' arrest record has not been much
better: U.S.
troops have arrested only three war crimes suspects in their
sector of eastern Bosnia. But while the Americans' reluctance to
carry out arrests seems to be based almost entirely on fear of
U.S. casualties, several incidents suggest that French failure to
carry out arrests may be based on something else: a larger pattern
of tacit French tolerance and sympathy for Serb actions in the
Balkans. For one, although the French military recalled Gormillon
to Paris after he was caught passing NATO secrets to Karadzic,
Gormillon has never been dismissed nor seriously disciplined by
the French military, despite the fact that his actions threatened the
safety of his fellow NATO soldiers and delivered a severe blow
to the cause of Bosnian justice.
A second incident of French spying for Belgrade occurred last
year. In October 1998, during the escalation of hostilities in
Kosovo, a senior French military officer posted to NATO, Cmdr.
Bunel, was discovered to have passed NATO's bombing target
list to Belgrade.
A French embassy spokesman said Monday that the French
government was treating both spying incidents seriously.
"Commander Bunel was indicted on charges of high treason in
October 1998, and arraigned before a military court. Gormillon
was hastily recalled to Paris, and I don't recall what happened to
him after that."
