Mladic close to surrender, Serbs claim
War crimes fugitive Mladic found, officials say
Key Events in the Life of Ratko Mladic
Belgrade’s Studio B TV said Gen Mladic, wanted by the international tribunal in The Hague for war crimes, had been located near Bosnia’s Serbian border. But a government spokesman rejected reports of his capture as “manipulation which damages the government”.
Eleven years after the largest and most infamous genocide since WWII, “The Butcher of Srebrenica”, Ratko Mladic may finally be about to be brought to justice. To say that it’s about damn time would be a horrific understatement, but there you have it. International justice is often a contradicition in terms, and in this case it can only fairly be described as a miscarriage of justice.
I am somewhat appalled that Mladic seems to be negotiating his surrender. What a war criminal such as Mladic possibly could have to negotiate is beyond me, but I suppose diplomacy works in strange ways. Mladic is personally responsible for unimaginable butchery during the war in Bosnia, and he is allowed the luxury of negotiating the terms of his surrender? I’d like to leave him in a room for five minutes with a few Bosnian Muslims and let them mete out some frontier justice. Of course, I suppose this is why I’m not the head of the UN mission in the former Yugoslavia.
Gen Mladic, who is 63, was Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s army chief throughout the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
The court has indicted him over the siege of Sarajevo, which claimed at least 10,000 lives, and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys were killed.
It was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
And thus far, no one has done a g——-n thing about it.
The European Union warned Belgrade last month that moves towards its eventual membership in the club would be halted if it failed to hand him over.
An EU report is due at the end of February on the extent of Serbia’s co-operation with the UN tribunal, and Serbian leaders have acknowledged that failure to hand him over would hamper talks on the final status of the UN-administered province of Kosovo.
As he dismissed reports of Gen Mladic’s arrest, government spokesman Srdjan Djuric said such speculation detracted from Belgrade’s efforts “to fully complete its co-operation with The Hague”.
The EU and the tribunal have also said they have no information about the reported arrest.
But tribunal spokeswoman Florence Hartmann repeated assertions made by Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte that Gen Mladic is in Serbia and “in the immediate reach of the authorities”.
After eleven years, I’m not about to get all excited about something that hasn’t even taken place yet. To say that the arrest of Mladic and Radovan Karadzic is long overdue would hardly begin to address the ineptitude of the international community in this respect. Both Karadzic and Mladic should have been arrested, tried, convicted, and executed long ago. The war in Bosnia ended 11 years ago, and both of these war criminals are still wandering around free somewhere in Serbia or Serb-held Bosnia. For the Serbian government to say that for the past 11 years they’ve been unaware of the whereabouts of both Karadzic an Mladic strains credibility. I have little doubt that the Serbian government has known EXACTLY where both of them have been all along. I can tell you from my time there that the Serbian internal intelligence community misses very little and forgives even less. This should lead a reasonable person to conclude that the government has been doing no more than they’ve absolutely had to in order to convince the international community of their “seriousness” in capturing both Karadzic and Mladic.
If Serbia was truly serious about becoming a full member of the international community, they would produce both Mladic and Karadzic tout suite. Justice demands nothing less.
