Crunch time for Serbia in hunt for Mladic

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Crunch time for Serbia in hunt for Mladic

· Genocide suspect still at large, says UN prosecutor
· Belgrade faces crucial choices as pressure grows

Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Thursday February 23, 2006
The Guardian

The UN prosecutor in charge of bringing Ratko Mladic to justice yesterday stated categorically that he remained at large in Serbia and demanded that the EU step up the pressure on the Serbian government to secure his arrest and trial.

Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague, dismissed the reports about Mladic's arrest as utterly unfounded. After criticising Austria, the current chair of the EU, for resisting pressure to have Mladic captured, Ms Del Ponte said: "I need now a stronger support of the EU to have Mladic in The Hague very soon. Clear deadlines with clear sanctions will produce early results."

Despite Ms Del Ponte's unequivocal statement, conspiracy theorists in Belgrade were having a field day with a dozen different versions circulating on Mladic's whereabouts. He was variously said to have been arrested with a bodyguard on a Belgrade boulevard, dug in on a mountainside 60 miles to the west, at a reinforced underground missile site and in a Serbian Orthodox monastery. "It's a virtual arrest," quipped Tomislav Nikolic, the extreme nationalist opposition leader. As the speculation swirled about the fate of the general, who masterminded the siege of Sarajevo in 1992-95, leaving 12,000 dead, and the massacre of Srebrenica, when 8,000 died in less than a week in July 1995, there was also a sense of déjà vu, especially in Sarajevo.

"For the past 10 years, we get this every six months - 'Mladic about to be arrested'. Then it's an anticlimax," said a senior international analyst in Bosnia.

This time, however, things seem to be different. The Serbian governing elite currently faces a barrage of crucial decisions, negotiations and ultimatums. For better or worse, the pressure may leave Serbia a transformed country by the year's end.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,,1715919,00.html