BELGRADE: UN war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz said Monday that Serbia was not the only territory considered in the search for Ratko Mladic but insisted that the key to his arrest lies in Belgrade.
“The main working hypothesis is that the solution to his arrest is in Belgrade, but of course operational activities are not only concentrated on Serbia but are logically also into other areas,” Brammertz told a press conference after meeting with Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vucevic.
When pressed about Mladic’s whereabouts Brammertz did not repeat the UN war crimes court’s usual mantra that there is no reason to believe Mladic is not in Serbia.
“I think that if somebody would know exactly where physically he is I hope that he would already have been arrested, so you can never exclude any working hypothesis, there are several working hypotheses, but the main one is still (…) that the answer is here,” he said.
Recently Serbian officials also changed their tone on the subject, insisting Mladic will be arrested “if he is in Serbia”, a caveat not added before. Asked about Belgrade’s change of tone Serbian war crimes prosecutor Vucevic did not want to comment.
“I would not like to talk about that, these are intelligence data,” he told journalists separately.
Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander, is wanted on charges of genocide for his key role in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. He is considered to be the mastermind behind the slaying of 8,000 Muslim men from Srebrenica and the 44-month siege of Sarajevo which killed 10,000 people.
His arrest and that of the other remaining fugitive, Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, “is priority number one” for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Brammertz said.
“I think it is the prime responsibility of Serbia but we are also asking other countries to be very supportive to make sure that this chapter can be ended,” he said. Serbia has stepped up cooperation with the court since pro-European forces took office in 2008.
Mladic’s arrest is seen as the ultimate proof that Belgrade is cooperating with the the UN court, a key condition for Serbia to join the European Union.
While Brammertz acknowledged that there have been improvements in Belgrade’s cooperation he added there was still work to be done. He stressed the importance of investigating and prosecuting the fugitives’ support network.
“If Mladic has (…) been so successful in hiding, there are of course reasons for it,” Brammertz said.
“It is obvious that he is not alone and it’s obvious that he has a support of other persons, and that is of course in the center of investigations. I cannot go more into details about the issues which are really of an operational and confidential nature,” he added.
Two weeks ago a verdict due to be handed down to ten suspects charged with helping Mladic to evade justice between 2002 and 2005 was indefinitely delayed for procedural reasons.
Also earlier this month police raided three locations in its search for Mladic’s support network and detained one man. Belgrade also recently increased the reward for information leading to the arrest of Mladic tenfold to 10 million euros (13.6 million dollars).
