|
Actor Gere hopes to meet Radovan Karadzic
2006-09-20
US actor Richard Gere, who is shooting a Hollywood thriller about Radovan Karadzic, has said he wanted to meet the top Balkans war crimes fugitive, who has been on the run for over a decade. "As soon as I got here (to Bosnia) I started asking people do you think it would be possible (to meet Karadzic) and almost everyone just said no it's not possible, don't even think about it," Gere told journalists Wednesday. However, the actor said that a few people hinted that such an encounter could be arranged. "They did not say this but you see that in their minds. It's possible, but is it worth it?" Gere said without elaborating on his interlocutors. Karadzic, for whose arrest the US State Department has offered a five-million-dollar (four-million-euro) reward, has been on the run since he was charged with genocide in 1995 by the UN war crimes court in The Hague. The Bosnian Serb wartime leader is accused of ordering the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim males in Srebrenica during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, in the worst atrocity Europe has seen since World War II. He and his associate General Ratko Mladic are believed to be hiding somewhere in either Serbia or the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia. The shooting of Richard Shepard's "Spring break in Sarajevo," in which Gere plays a journalist trying to find Karadzic, started earlier this month in Sarajevo. "Our movie doesn't have Karadzic as a character in the film. We fictionalized a war criminal that they (journalists) are after," Shepard said. The film poses the question of "why there are war criminals throughout the world, whom the world says they wanna to catch and yet they don't," he added. Shepard's film is based on an article written by Scott Anderson, who reported on the Bosnian war for Esquire magazine. Gere will shoot in Sarajevo until Friday and the rest of the movie, which also stars Terrence Howard and Jesse Eisenberg, will be filmed in neighboring Croatia.
| 
