Serbia "Trying Hard" to Locate Mladic

27 Oct 2010 / 09:36
Serbia "Trying Hard" to Locate Mladic
Local observers in Serbia say the country is making an effort to locate war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, a necessary step for Belgrade's EU bid to move forward.
Bojana Barlovac
Daniel Sunter, editor of Balkan Intelligence Monthly, says the government under President Boris Tadic has removed many powerful officials who worked in the country's security agencies under Milosevic and is working to fulfill its obligations to the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

"Serbia has been working with international services for some time on locating both Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic," he told Balkan Insight.

Former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague for genocide committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Hadzic, who was the leader of the breakaway Croatian Serb republic, is charged by the Hague Tribunal with 14 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Croatia between August 1991 and June 1992.

According to Sunter, the failure to locate the fugitives is due to the fact that a circle of people who previously worked for the security services are protecting the men.

Sonja Biserko, director of the Helsinki Committee in Serbia, and Milan Antonijevic from Serbia's Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Yucom, both recognise positive changes in Serbia's official stance towards the Hague Tribunal.

While Biserko has argued that the public announcement that Serbian investigators had found Mladic's wartime diaries could be seen as a sign of a shift in attitude, Antonijevic points to changed rhetoric.

"Politicians have changed their rhetoric and there is no major perception of Mladic as a hero, which was the case previously," Antonijevic told Balkan Insight.

Dejan Anastasijevic from the Serbian weekly Vreme believes, however, that the unfulfilled cooperation with the Hague Tribunal is a sign of the state's poor control over its security services.

"Now the onus is on Serbia to prove whether it is a real state or not, as every real state should be able to find and arrest fugitives with its security services," Anastasijevic told Balkan Insight.

On Monday, EU foreign minsters decided to forward Serbia's EU candidacy application to the European Commission but noted that any further steps toward the EU would not be taken unless Belgrade was seen to be fully cooperating with the Hague Tribunal.

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