Serbia: Bin Laden Death Puts Spotlight On Ratko Mladic

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Death of world’s most-wanted terrorist strips Serbia of one more excuse for not having found the war-crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, military expert says.

By Bojana Barlovac

Serbian officials have often said that they could not be expected to catch the former Bosnian Serb commander while even the world’s greatest power could not track down the Al-Qaeda boss, Osama Bin Laden.

The example of the failed hunt for Bin Laden was frequently cited by Serbian government officials as a point of comparison. The official search for Mladic started at about the same time as the US declared its “war on terror” in 2001.

Serbia
Serbia

Ljubodrag Stojadinovic, a Belgrade military analyst, says it now turns out that “Mladic was better hidden than Bin Laden”.

With Bin Laden located and killed, Serbia may come under renewed pressure to find the ex-general, wanted for the mass slaughter of 8,000 Bosniaks [Muslims] in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in 1995, among other crimes.

Stojadinovic said he believed that the network of Mladic helpers is not nearly as big as Bin Laden’s had been, and they are far less fanatical about shielding him from justice.

“He remains at large mainly because he is constantly getting information from the same headquarters that are supposed to be in charge of his arrest,” Stojadinovic added.

Serbia’s security services were still clearly stronger than the Serbian state, he concluded.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, ICTY, charges the ex-general with genocide and other grave war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

His arrest is seen as crucial for Serbia’s hopes of moving towards membership of the European Union.

The chief of the UN war crimes court, Serge Brammertz, is expected to give his assessment of Serbia’s search on May 10, when he is due to visit Belgrade before submitting a report on the country’s cooperation with the ICTY to the UN Security Council.

Balkan Insight

The Balkan Insight (formerly the Balkin Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN) is a close group of editors and trainers that enables journalists in the region to produce in-depth analytical and investigative journalism on complex political, economic and social themes. BIRN emerged from the Balkan programme of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, IWPR, in 2005. The original IWPR Balkans team was mandated to localise that programme and make it sustainable, in light of changing realities in the region and the maturity of the IWPR intervention. Since then, its work in publishing, media training and public debate activities has become synonymous with quality, reliability and impartiality. A fully-independent and local network, it is now developing as an efficient and self-sustainable regional institution to enhance the capacity for journalism that pushes for public debate on European-oriented political and economic reform.

2 thoughts on “Serbia: Bin Laden Death Puts Spotlight On Ratko Mladic

  • May 8, 2011 at 11:57 am
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    My guess is he is hiding in plain sight in Novi Beograd. With the dream of the EU fading fast – in Croatia, where accession chapters are all but closed, there’s still debate over whether or not the citizens really want to join – those in Serbia or Bosnia’s Republika Srpska don’t have much incentive to turn him in.

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  • June 11, 2011 at 2:11 pm
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    It seems that the quest is over since general Mladic was just recently been arrested and deported to the Hague tribunal.

    Reply

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