|
U.N. Prosecutor Says Belgrade Will Help Hand Over Mladic
BELGRADE, Sept 4 (News Agencies) - The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said on Tuesday Serbia had agreed to help arrest and hand over most-wanted war crimes suspect General Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb military chief now in Serbian territory.
"We have spoken [to the authorities in Belgrade] about the fugitive Mladic given that, according to our information, he is here," Del Ponte told reporters before leaving the Serbian capital for Bosnia.
"We need help to find him, arrest him and transfer him to The Hague," she said. Asked by a reporter whether Belgrade would help capture Mladic, she said: "Yes, it will cooperate."
Mladic and Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic head the most-wanted list of the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
They are accused of war crimes for their role in the 1992-95 Bosnia war, notably for the massacre of between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.
Del Ponte was speaking just after the head of the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia (SFOR), U.S. General Michael Dodson, said he knew where Mladic and Karadzic were and that they were not in Bosnia.
It was the first time a SFOR official had acknowledged he knew where the two fugitive leaders were.
On several occasions Del Ponte has criticized the NATO-led force for not tracking them down. Previously it had been widely believed that the duo was in hiding in the Serb-run part of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska.
Dodson told a news conference Karadzic and Mladic did sneak in and out of Bosnia but that it was difficult to catch them, pointing out that SFOR's mandate did not extend beyond Bosnia's borders.
"They do come into Bosnia ... but often they come in quickly and exit quickly and that makes them very difficult to apprehend... We must make sure that there is not perceived freedom of movement for these people. They must be denied access in each of the countries of the region," Dodson said.
He said he would use a scheduled meeting in Sarajevo with Del Ponte to argue for a regional strategy for catching war crimes suspects.
In a landmark decision in late June, Belgrade transferred former president Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Karadzic and Mladic have proved more elusive and rumors have abounded as to their whereabouts, with some suggesting that Karadzic might be in the small Yugoslav republic of Montenegro or that he had shaved his head and disguised himself as a monk to avoid detection.
Del Ponte, who arrived in Sarajevo late on Tuesday evening, is due to meet Bosnian Prime Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija, representatives of SFOR, the U.N. and the international community's senior envoy to the Balkan country, and members of the collegiate Bosnian presidency.
Earlier she assured the Serbian authorities in Belgrade that The Hague court was also probing alleged war crimes by ethnic Albanians in Serbia's Kosovo province.
However, she refused to comment on the case of Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, who the U.N. court is particularly anxious to try on war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in Belgrade's crackdown on Kosovo's ethnic Albanian community in 1998-99.
Milutinovic, who was indicted by the court over Kosovo along with Milosevic and three other top officials, is the only senior official to have retained his post following the October 2000 revolt that toppled Milosevic.
|
