About 1,000 Bosnian Serbs protested yesterday against the arrest of an army commander accused of involvement in a massacre of Muslim men, and the Bosnian Serb president called the arrest "shameful".
Mr Dragan Obrenovic, who commanded a Serb brigade during Bosnia's civil war, was arrested on Sunday by NATO-led Sfor troops in Kozluk, not far from Zvornik, where the protest was held.
He was flown to the Scheveningen detention centre near The Hague at around midnight (11 p.m. Irish time) on Sunday and is due to appear before the UN war crimes tribunal this week.
A spokeswoman for the tribunal said the indictment contained five counts of complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, all related to the massacre in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
"Dragan Obrenovic participated in a criminal plan and enterprise, the common purpose of which was to detain, capture, summarily execute by firing squad and bury over 5,000 Muslim men and boys from the Srebrenica enclave," part of the indictment alleged, according to the court.
The Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug quoted Mr Mirko Sarovic, the president of Bosnia's Serb republic, as saying the arrest of Mr Obrenovic was "really shameful for the Hague tribunal". The Muslim-Croat federation is post-war Bosnia's other half.
Mr Sarovic's nationalist SDS party, the biggest in the Serb republic, has been under pressure from the United States to start co-operating with the UN court and to expel its founder, Mr Radovan Karadzic, another war crimes indictee, from its ranks.
Mr Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and his military chief, Mr Ratko Mladic, have been charged with orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo and are believed to be hiding in eastern Bosnia.
Mr Sarovic criticised the use of a secret indictment, meaning the charges were not made public to avoid alerting Mr Obrenovic.
"The activities of the Hague Tribunal and the existence of secret indictments do not contribute to the strengthening of peace and trust in this area," he said.
Belgrade-based radio B-92 quoted Mr Obrenovic's wife, Bojana, as saying her husband had been in the garden of her father's house.
"Two cars stopped at the gate, three men and a woman in civilian clothing got out of the cars and ushered him over. Without suspecting anything he approached them. The men pulled out guns and, threatening him, put him into the car," she said.
Mr Tihomir Jasikovac, a speaker at the protest, said: "We've had enough of being taken peacefully to The Hague. Let's wake up, take up arms and defend our heroes."