Analyse: Serbien – abhängig von Mladic

Die Tatsache, dass Serbien den flüchtigen General Ratko Mladic nicht dingfest gemacht hat, stürzt es in eine noch tiefere Isolation. Diese Meinung vertritt Igor Jovanovic in Transitions Online.

The Serbian government is under immense pressure from the European Union and from the other democratic parties in the country after missing the deadline to apprehend fugitive General Ratko Mladic. 

Serbia’s failure to arrest the former Bosnian Serb military commander and transfer him to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) by the end of April has endangered its European prospects and the survival of the minority government of Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica.

After Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn announced on 3 May that the EU was suspending association talks with Serbia and Montenegro until Mladic was in ICTY custody in The Hague, Serbian police launched a wide-ranging operation aimed at finding Mladic, who faces charges of genocide in Bosnia during the 1992–1995 war.

Buzzing the bees

In the course of three days, police arrested several people suspected of helping Mladic after 2002, when a law banning aid to ICTY fugitives was passed. That year Mladic was stripped of all his passes to enter military facilities. The Serbian authorities claim that they do not know where Mladic has been hiding since then. 

On 5 May police special forces held the Belgrade district of Banovo Brdo, where Mladic’s family lives, under blockade for several hours.

Two days later, the operations continued in the Valjevo area of western Serbia, where the fugitive general lived at times until 2002. Police helicopters hovered overhead as masked policemen searched the homes and bee farms of Mladic’s former neighbors.

The search netted only a few little-known individuals. Those arrested so far seem to be of modest means, and most have links to the army of Serbia and Montenegro or the armed forces of Bosnia’s Serb-led Republika Srpska entity, allegedly coming into contact with Mladic there. A source close to the hunt for Mladic told TOL that police had found several rented apartments where he stayed, adding that he had been living in conditions “unworthy of human dignity.”

In contrast to the case of Croatian General Ante Gotovina, who was linked with one of Croatia’s richest businessmen, Hrvoje Petrac, before his arrest in December 2005 in the Canary Islands, some observers believe that Mladic has been hiding in modest apartments with the help of a very small number of people. 

Talking to reporters after a Serbian government session on 4 May, Economy Minister Predrag Bubalo said that Mladic’s movements between April 2002 and late 2005 had been fully reconstructed. However, the minister did not explain how the security services, which have until recently claimed they did not know where Mladic has been hiding, have managed to retrace his movements so quickly. Bubalo added that Mladic seemed to completely disappear in late 2005. He said that Mladic’s support network had shrunk from around 50 people in 2002 to 10 or so, and that five people had been arrested between January and April on suspicion of renting apartments on Mladic’s behalf. They include two former members of the Republika Srpska armed forces and a retired Serbia-Montenegro army officer.

The latest police operations resulted in the arrests of four people suspected of bringing food to Mladic, and a former Republika Srpska army officer and head of the Bosnian Serb military security service, Marko Lugonja. The details of the case against them are protected by state secrecy laws, but Belgrade media reported that all had been in contact with Mladic in 2002.

If such reports turn out to have a basis in fact, further doubt will fall over the effectiveness of the ongoing police operations. ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has already said that she was not impressed with the actions undertaken by the Serbian police, describing them as “theater.”

Serbia and Montenegro’s minister for human rights and minorities, Rasim Ljajic, tried to explain why the Mladic case has been such a challenge for the Serbian democratic authorities for years now. Mladic could have been arrested after the ouster of the late President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000, but it was politically dangerous to do so then, he said. When the political climate changed after the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in 2003, the chance to nab Mladic had passed. Now that the arrest is a political option, „it cannot be done, meaning we don’t know where Mladic is,” Ljajic said.

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.