Karadzic backers protest extradition plan

15,000 rally over tribunal; Clash with police leaves 45 injured

Demonstrators advanced toward police after the rally yesterday in Belgrade and were met with tear gas. The ultranationalist protesters burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs, and hurled stones at storefront windows. (Srdjan Ilic/associated press)

BELGRADE - Stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade last night at a rally to protest the arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on war crimes charges and his extradition to stand trial in The Hague.

Karadzic is charged with engineering Europe's worst massacre since World War II, but is celebrated by his supporters as a hero.

The Serb war crimes prosecutor's office said in a statement this morning that his extradition to the tribunal in the Netherlands had gotten underway before dawn.

Four jeeps with tinted windows were seen speeding away from the downtown Belgrade war crimes court at about 3:45 a.m. where Karadzic was being held since his arrest July 21.

About 15,000 of his supporters, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered earlier to protest the new government that arrested him.

Protesters wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Karadzic's image waved Serbian flags and chanted "Long Live Radovan!" and "Uprising! Uprising!" while about 100 ultranationalists wearing masks who had separated from the group burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs, and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas and blocked off several neighborhoods. The Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.

"Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s," said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia's pro-Western president, Boris Tadic. "Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free."

The rally was seen as a test of the new government, which is made up of Tadic's Democrats and the Socialist Party of the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, which controls the Interior Ministry and the police.

Before the rally began, Tadic implored the protesters to remain peaceful, determined to avoid a repeat of demonstrations last February, when thousands of radicals rampaged through the streets of Belgrade to protest Kosovo's declaration of independence, looting shops and setting part of the US Embassy on fire.

Karadzic, a former psychiatrist, is accused of masterminding the 1995 massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. He also has been indicted in connection with the 3 1/2-year siege of Sarajevo, from 1992 to 1995, in which he is accused of authorizing the killing of civilians.

He had evaded arrest for more than a decade, living openly in Belgrade for at least part of that time disguised as an ascetic New Age guru with a bushy beard, a mistress, and a fake family in the United States.

Belgrade was determined to send Karadzic to The Hague as swiftly as possible to prevent an escalation in tensions and to satisfy the European Union, which considers handing over war crimes suspects a prerequisite for Serbia to join.

Serbian analysts said the emotional and violent outpouring of support for Karadzic showed that Serbia had yet to reckon with its role in Srebrenica.

"Since Milosevic fell, few in our government have confronted the war crimes perpetrated in Serbia's name," Brankica Stankovic, one of the country's leading television journalists, said yesterday.

Pavovski, the Radical Party supporter, said she was unmoved by what happened at Srebrenica. "Nobody has proved that a massacre took place," she said. "Srebrenica is the product of a media war against Serbia and the Serbian people."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.