From The Aus.
War crimes net tightens on Mladic
Peter Wilson, Zagreb, Croatia
February 23, 2006EUROPE’S most-wanted war crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic, appeared yesterday to be nearing the end of a comfortable and audacious decade hiding out among his Serb supporters.
Serbia’s most credible media outlets reported that the former head of the Bosnian Serb army was about to be handed over to a UN-backed war crimes tribunal as Serbia faced a one-week deadline to produce the man accused of the slaughter of 8000 men and boys at Srebrenica.
War crimes investigators claim the Belgrade Government and army never really tried to capture Mladic and say any change in their attitude has only come about because of the threat that EU accession talks will end if he is not sent to the Hague court by next Tuesday.
Mladic’s continuing freedom is the main obstacle to Serbia’s EU ambitions, which are the key aim of the Serbian Government.
After years of denying it was allowing Mladic to remain free, Belgrade has been forced into a series of embarrassing admissions in recent weeks, including confirmation that for years it had allowed his son to keep drawing Mladic’s military pension to help finance his liberty.
Serbia’s most reliable and independent broadcaster, B92, reported yesterday that Mladic, 63, had been arrested in Serbia and was being transferred to the US military base at Tuzla in Bosnia to be flown to The Hague.
The same strategy was used in 2001 to send former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to trial in The Hague, and B92 said the Government hoped Mladic’s emergence in Bosnia would allow it to rebut allegations he had been hiding in Serbia all along.
But government spokesman Srdjan Djuric vehemently denied Mladic had been captured.
“The news about Ratko Mladic is not correct,” Mr Djuric said. “It is a manipulation which damages the Government.”
However, other media outlets, including the official news agency Tanjug and the Bosnian Serb agency SRNA, backed the B92 report, saying Mladic had been arrested in Belgrade.
The privately owned Beta news agency said Mladic had been found on Cer Mountain, about 100km west of Belgrade on the border with Bosnia.
Well-connected political figures in Serbia told The Australian that if Mladic had not already been captured he was in his last days of freedom, despite the fact many Serbs see him as a hero of the war over the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
Mladic was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1995, accused of genocide in the 3 1/2-year siege of Sarajevo, in which 12,000 civilians died, and for overseeing the massacre in the same year of unarmed Muslims in the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica - the worst atrocity committed anywhere in Europe since World War II.
His former political leader, Radovan Karadzic, faces the same charges, but it is widely believed in the Balkans that Karadzic is dead or living overseas.
Mladic, on the other hand, has taunted his opponents with occasional public appearances.
He lived openly in Belgrade for more than six years after his indictment until Milosevic lost power, and he is then believed to have gone only partly underground with the help of former army colleagues.
Mladic would regularly appear in public to attend football matches, where he was mobbed by admiring Serbs, or for ostentatious dinner engagements.
The Government has admitted in recent weeks that Mladic was given government-funded medical treatment at a Belgrade hospital under three different names in the 1990s.
Defence Minister Zoran Stankovic says the Government is investigating more than 50 former soldiers suspected of helping Mladic evade capture, and that two of them have been arrested.
Mr Stankovic has admitted that Mladic’s military pension was being picked up by his son.
Mladic, Karadzic and four other Serbs are the only remaining fugitives from 161 people indicted by the tribunal over the Bosnian war, which claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and displaced half the country’s four million people.
The last remaining Croatian fugitive, General Ante Gotovina, was handed over in December, greatly increasing the pressure on Serbia to produce its own fugitives and hand them over to the tribunal in The Hague.
The Serbian Government conceded that an enormous amount was at stake in the EU talks and discussions over the future status of its UN-run province of Kosovo.
An adviser to Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, Vladeta Jankovic, said Mladic’s handover was “almost a condition of survival” for the Government and the nation.
