Russia and US "blocked Karadzic arrest" - book

BELGRADE, Sep 8 (Reuters) Russia blocked the arrest of Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Radovan Karadzic in 1997 and the United States and Britain persuaded France not to insist on it, according to a new book by a top war crimes official.

Florence Hartmann, former spokeswoman at the Hague war crimes tribunal for Yugoslavia, recounts how President Bill Clinton, supported by Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Helmut Kohl, persuaded France's Jacques Chirac not to push the issue.

Hartmann says they met in the garden of the Elysee Palace in Paris in May 1997, 17 months after the peace accords which ended the 1992-95 Bosnia war.

Chirac was still fuming over the capture of two French pilots who were shot down and held hostage by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995, and wanted to expunge the affront.

''Bill Clinton stressed that the operation could not be undertaken without informing the Russians. Chirac was opposed because Moscow had firmly opposed the arrest of Karadzic and would have immediately tipped him off,'' Hartmann writes.

Karadzic, who was ''president'' of Bosnia's rebel Serb Republic during the war, is still at large 11 years later, indicted on two counts of genocide for the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims and Croats.

''Clinton insisted, supported by Blair. Chirac ended up by conceding the issue,'' writes Hartmann in ''Peace and Punishment'', excerpted by the Paris daily Le Monde.

''Karadzic was not arrested because of Russian opposition,'' she quotes Chirac as telling Hague prosecutor Carla del Ponte.

''Boris Yeltsin told me: Karadzic knows too much about (then Yugoslav president Slobodan) Milosevic. He warned me he would send a plane to get him out of Bosnia if necessary, but he would never permit the arrest of Karadzic,'' Chirac is quoted as saying.

In November 1997, as NATO-patrolled Bosnia was about to hold a post-war election, a Russian plane whisked Karadzic off to Belarus for several months to keep him out of danger.

But the book describes how leaders of the major powers each blamed the other for failure to arrest the man held responsible for Europe's worst atrocities since World War Two.

In 2000, del Ponte was told by Chirac that the United States had prevented the arrest of Karadzic in Bosnia, hardening his belief that Washington had a secret deal to let him go free.

Former NATO commander Wesley Clark, however, asserted to del Ponte that it was France which had made a secret no-arrest deal with Karadzic and his wartime commander General Ratko Mladic, in order to obtain the release of the two French aviators.

In 2004, del Ponte learned of the imminent arrest of Karadzic in Bosnia and Serbia's appeal to France to arrange his transfer to The Hague.

''The Americans intervened with the Serbs to stop the operation. The information was immediately transmitted to the (NATO force) commander in Bosnia and a few hours later a helicopter flew over the area, thereby alerting Karadzic.'' Del Ponte says Mladic is hiding in Serbia. Karadzic may be in Bosnia or Montenegro, but has dropped out of sight entirely.

REUTERS SW HT0917