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Milosevic death jeopardises Mladic handover

Tuesday, March 21, 2006 - 01:58 PM

The death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, and the outbursts of nationalism during his funeral in Serbia, make it unlikely that General Ratko Mladic will soon be handed over to the UN war crimes tribunal, Europe’s top security agency said in a report today.

The EU has said that if Mladic was not handed over to the tribunal by March 31, the EU would suspend its negotiations with Serbia on joining the bloc. The next round of the negotiations was set for April 5.

“Recent events do not increase the prospects that General Mladic will be delivered to The Hague by the EU-imposed deadline,” the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe said in the report.

Milosevic, who died on March 11 of a heart attack at his war crimes detention unit near The Hague, Netherlands, was buried on Saturday in his native town of Pozarevac with tens of thousands of his nationalist supporters attending.

The massive outbursts of pro-Milosevic nationalist sentiments during the funeral ceremonies increased pressure against the Serbian conservative government to stall on the handover of Mladic and other top war crimes suspects to The Hague tribunal, despite an end-of-March deadline set by the European Union.

Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander, was indicted by the UN tribunal in 1995 for the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica and for a three-year siege by his troops of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.

The most-wanted war crimes fugitive is believed hiding in Serbia under the protection of hard-liners in the military.

“Particularly coming only a few days after the suicide of former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic in (The Hague tribunal’s detention) cell, the circumstances of Milosevic’s death will not improve the credibility of the tribunal among the Serbian public,” the OSCE report said.

OSCE also said in the report that “it is highly unlikely that Milosevic’s death will produce turmoil or instability in Serbia”.

“On the contrary, the former president’s absence from the political scene removes the possibility that he could again become a focal point for nationalism or opposition to the country’s reintegration into the international community,” the OSCE “Spot Report” said.

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