A highly sensitive operation appeared to be under way on Tuesday night to secure the surrender and transfer to The Hague of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serbian war commander who is Europe’s most wanted war crimes suspect.
A flurry of confusing and contradictory reports left it unclear as to the whereabouts and condition of the 63-year-old, wanted on charges of genocide by the international war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague.
Serbian and Bosnian Serb media reported that Mladic had been captured and taken to a United States air base at Tuzla in north-eastern Bosnia to be put on an aircraft to The Hague.
But the Serbian government of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica vehemently denied the reports, describing them as a manipulation and suggesting that factional political infighting was behind the leaking of information.
”This is all still in the realm of rumour,” said a well-placed international source in former Yugoslavia of the reports of Mladic’s arrest. ”There’s definitely a negotiation going on and the Serbs are under enormous international pressure to get Mladic. They’re in contact with him.”
Another source in Belgrade was sceptical that Mladic had been arrested, pointing to the unusually strong denials by the Serbian interior ministry and the prime minister’s office.
”The news about Ratko Mladic is not correct. It is a manipulation,” said Srdjan Duric, Kostunica’s spokesperson.
Nato sources also could not confirm any arrest and denied the information about Mladic being flown out from the Tuzla air base to the Hague. But the air of a security crisis and expectation in the Serbian capital was heightened by the sound of an air raid alert on Tuesday night and the unusual sight of a helicopter flying over the city in the dark.
Signs that Mladic’s days are numbered have been mounting in recent days, more than 10 years after he was indicted for genocide for overseeing the murder of almost 8 000 Bosnian Muslim males at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995.
Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor in The Hague, has been lobbying the European Union strenuously over the past week to put pressure on Serbia to arrest Mladic by the end of the month or risk a halt to negotiations between Brussels and Belgrade on Serbia’s integration with the EU.
Senior EU officials have been in Belgrade in recent days to hammer home the message. Del Ponte also fiercely criticised the Austrian government, currently chairing the EU, for not doing enough to put pressure on the Serbs.
”This is a crucial moment for the perspective of this country,” Vladeta Jankovic, deputy leader of the governing party in Serbia and adviser to Kostunica said on Tuesday. ”This [Mladic] problem has to be solved, and it will be solved in the shortest possible period.”
The Associated Press quoted Serbian security sources as saying that Mladic had been located, but that he had not been arrested and that negotiations were taking place.
International sources said that Mladic was in Serbia, rather than the Serbian half of Bosnia, and that Serbian security services were negotiating with him. But the sources were uncertain as to a quick and conclusive outcome.
Mladic and his wartime political colleague, Radovan Karadzic, have been on the run since 1995, but only seriously went into hiding in recent years since little attempt was made to apprehend them at the end of the Bosnian war in 1995.
The third most wanted man on the tribunal’s list, the Croatian officer, Ante Gotovina, was arrested in the Canary Islands in December after five years on the run, taking the pressure off Croatia and increasing it on Serbia.
Mladic and Karadzic, however, are incomparably more significant figures than Gotovina. Mladic was arguably the preeminent Serbian military officer in the 1991-1995 campaign to hijack as much as possible of the disintegrating Yugoslavia and construct a Greater Serbia.
He was the military mastermind of the destruction of Bosnia. Although most infamous for the biggest single massacre of the Bosnian war at Srebrenica towards the war’s end in 1995, for the previous four years Mladic was the most ruthless and determined instrument of President Slobodan Milosevic’s disastrous strategy to hijack Yugoslavia and carve a Greater Serbia out of the ruins of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
According to his army file obtained last year by investigators in The Hague, he was made commander of the Bosnian Serb military in May 1992. After Mladic’s appointment came a whirlwind of murder, pogrom, siege and destruction giving birth to the term ”ethnic cleansing”.
Mladic faces 15 counts of genocide, murder, extermination, hostage-taking, and persecution at the tribunal in The Hague. His alleged crimes were the means, according to the chargesheet, to ”the elimination or permanent removal, by force or other means of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat or other non-Serb inhabitants from large areas of Bosnia.”
Backstory
For many in the Balkans and beyond, the Bosnian war will not be over until Ratko Mladic, the fugitive general, and Radovan Karadzic the Bosnian Serb’s wartime leader, have been brought to justice.
They are accused of orchestrating a campaign of mass killing not seen in Europe since the second world war. More than 100 000 people are thought to have died between 1992 and 1995. Their success in evading capture for more than a decade since has made a mockery of Nato’s might and Serbia’s supposed commitment to meeting its international commitments and track down the war criminals in its midst.
Mladic was an infantry colonel in the old Yugoslav National Army on the Bosnian-Croatian border when the war in Croatia began in 1991. He had risen to the rank of brigadier general when the conflict spread to Bosnia the following spring, and he took over command of Bosnian Serb forces and the bloody effort to ”ethnically cleanse” much of the country of Muslims.
While Karadzic, a psychiatrist and failed poet, put himself at the head of a self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic, Mladic became famous for his siege of Sarajevo, the multi-ethnic Bosnian capital and the steady attrition of its mainly civilian population. ”Stretch their brains,” he famously ordered his troops, who peppered the city with mortar and sniper fire. He oversaw other massacres, most notoriously the murder of more than 7 000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995. Mladic’s army, however, crumbled in the face of a Croatian offensive from the west, paving the way for the Dayton peace treaty. – Guardian Unlimited Â