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Wanted War Criminals

Serb butcher Ratko Mladic is in the clink after 16 years on the run. From Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir to former Nazi Gerhard Sommer, see our gallery of bad guys still on the loose.

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Abd Raouf / AP Photo
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Hiding out in a relative’s house near Belgrade, and living under an assumed name, Ratko Mladic—who is charged with crimes against humanity and genocide for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre—was armed but offered no resistance in a pre-dawn raid on May 26. Later that day, he appeared in court in Belgrade, where he was weak and apparently unable to communicate with a judge; at one point, the hearing was interrupted for a physical assessment. One of his arms apparently is paralyzed, perhaps due to a stroke. But Mladic remained defiant. “He does not recognize The Hague tribunal," his lawyer said. The former general is expected to be extradited to The Hague within a few days to face the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Oleg Stjepanovic / AP Photo
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As former president of Chechnya’s separatist movement, Dokka Umarov leads an Islamist insurgency seeking to carve a “Caucasus Emirate” in Chechnya and other predominantly Muslim regions in the North Caucasus. His group has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in the Moscow airport in January, and bombings in the Moscow metro in March 2010. The U.S. State Department recently offered a $5 million reward for his capture. In May 2011, Umarov said the death of Osama bin Laden would not stop his attacks and that, “Today the battlefield is not just Chechnya or the Caucasus Emirate, but the whole of Russia.”

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Omar al-Bashir is the current president of Sudan, who came to power following a bloodless coup in 1989. In 2004, his government granted autonomy to Southern Sudan, and since then violence around Sudan, including Darfur, has displaced millions of people. The U.N. estimates that more than 300,000 people have died in Darfur, and that the government is responsible for much of the carnage. In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him on charges of crimes against humanity. The ICC did not officially accuse him of genocide, and he denies all charges. Bashir said the warrant is not “worth the ink it is written on,” and Sudan has refused to give him up. Southern Sudan is scheduled to become an independent nation this year, following a referendum—whose results were accepted by Khartoum.

Abd Raouf / AP Photo
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Joseph Kony is the head of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel guerrilla group. Kony has been indicted by the International Criminal Court and is on America’s list of international terrorists. For the past two decades, the warlord has led his militia on a wave of violence in which many civilians in northern Uganda are abducted, tortured, and then dumped in southern Sudan. The political situation in Uganda has been unstable for years, and in spite of President Obama’s proposed plan to bring down the Lord’s Resistance Army, no humanitarian forces have intervened. Kony and his men tend to target women and children, kidnapping them from Uganda and using them as sex slaves and militia cadres in Sudan.

AP Photo
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Jean Bosco Ntaganda is the current leader of a Congo militia and has been wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2008. Though the militia’s general, Laurent Nkunda, was captured by Rwandan troops in early 2009, Ntaganda—the group’s former chief of staff and a notoriously merciless commander who is known as the Terminator—took over as leader. Rwanda has since attempted to arrest Ntaganda for war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly for conscripting child soldiers into the militia. He and fellow militia leader Thomas Lubanga were co-accused by the ICC in a trial that began in January of 2009. The case is still not settled, and both Ntaganda and Lubanga will make their next court appearance in August 2011.

Alain Wandimoyi / AP Photo
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Weatlhy businessman Félicien Kabuga, whom Forbes has called “ the most wanted man in Africa” has claimed he is innocent in response to accusations of bankrolling the 1994 Rwandan genocide that resulted in the deaths of approximately 800,000 Tutsi and non-militant Hutu people, according to Human Rights Watch. Though Kabuga’s whereabouts are currently unknown, the U.N.’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is still conducting proceedings against the wanted criminal to preserve evidence against him that can be used in a trial. In addition to Kabuga, the tribunal is looking for 10 other fugitives connected to the genocide.

Evelyn Hockstein / Getty Images
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Gerhard Sommer is among the new names on the list of “Most Wanted” in the Wiesenthal Center’s 10th annual report of Nazi War crime suspects. Sommer is now No. 4 on the center’s list of 12 most wanted criminals, two of whom are believed to be dead. Sommer, now 91, allegedly joined Hitler’s Youth movement when he was just 12 years old, and subsequently became one of Hitler’s SS officers. Though absent from the trial, Sommer was convicted in 2005 by an Italian military court for participating in the 1944 mass murder of 560 civilians in the now nearly deserted Tuscan village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema. He has been under investigation in Germany since 2002, but has never been arrested.

MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE