Serbia’s hopes for closer ties with the European Union have been stymied by the failure to arrest the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander.
Mladic, charged by the tribunal with genocide over Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, and Croatian Serb wartime leader Goran Hadzic are the last two suspects sought by the court based in The Hague, Netherlands. After his two-day visit to Belgrade, chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz is to deliver his regular report to the United Nations on Serbia’s cooperation with the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Rasim Ljajic, the government official in charge of cooperation with the tribunal who met Brammertz Monday, said Serbia’s security teams “have no trace” that could lead to Mladic. “Brammertz will probably not deliver a positive report because as we all know Mladic is not in The Hague,” Ljajic said. Mladic’s arrest “won’t happen today or tomorrow” and it will take “a miracle” for him to be arrested soon, Ljajic said. “We know that he was in Serbia until 2006 … but now we have no sign that he is still here,” Ljajic said before the meeting. Brammertz did not speak to reporters after his meetings.
Dusan Ignjatovic, a government official, said after meeting Brammertz that Serbia expects his “balanced” report to the U.N. next month, taking into account that Serbia in July arrested wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and handed him over to The Hague after more than a decade on the run. Mladic and Karadzic were charged by the U.N tribunal for allegedly orchestrating the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995 — the worst carnage in Europe since World War II — and for a bloody armed siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, during the Bosnian war.
