Mladic’s lawyer files appeal against detention

THE lawyer for war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic says he has formally filed an appeal against the former general’s detention — a move that will likely delay his extradition for at least a day.

Attorney Milos Saljic asked for a battery of doctors to examine the 69-year old. Mladic was arrested last week after 16 years on the run, and is said to have suffered at least two strokes.

Saljic says he has mailed his appeal from an unspecified post office in Belgrade yesterday. Court officials will now need to wait for it and review it before moving forward with the case.

Bruno Vekaric, Serbia’s deputy war crimes prosecutor, says Mladic is employing delaying tactics and that nothing should prevent his extradition to the international war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands.

It came as Serbian authorities detained 180 people who had attacked police, injuring 32, during a protest against the arrest of the Bosnian Serb wartime general, an interior ministry spokeswoman said yesterday.

Many of those at the Sunday night rally in Belgrade were young people, some not even born during Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war. Dozens of those detained by riot police were minors.

The Serbian Radical Party, whose leader is on trial in The Hague, brought in supporters by bus from across Serbia to rally for Mladic.

During the violence, 32 police and 11 protesters were hurt, and five cars and six shops suffered damage.

Mladic, indicted for genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the war, was arrested on Thursday in a village 100km north-east of Belgrade after 16 years on the run.

His arrest is key to Serbia’s bid for European Union candidacy and came just weeks before UN chief war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz was due to brief the UN Security Council on Serbia’s progress in the hunt for Mladic.

A Belgrade court ruled on Friday Mladic was fit enough to face genocide charges at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and has served extradition papers.

Both the Mladic family and the lawyer maintain the former general is mentally unstable and thus too ill to face trial.

At the Sunday rally, Darko Mladic said his father was a defender of his people.

“Ratko Mladic is not a criminal, he did not order the killings. He defended his people in an honourable, fair and professional manner,” he told protesters.

Many Serbians agree and admire Mladic as a dedicated military man who did not seek to enrich himself during the war.

But others were glad to see him arrested so that Serbia can distance itself from its international pariah status of the 1990s.

“The whole nation of eight million was being held behind because of the fate of one man, that is not right,” said a Belgrade taxi driver. “Mladic should have given himself up long ago so we did not suffer this fate.”

In Bosnia, Mladic’s supporters rallied on Sunday in the eastern town of Kalinovik where he spent his childhood.

Meanwhile, one of Ratko Mladic’s most senior commanders was in no doubt who was ultimately responsible for the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July of 1995.

“This chain of command originated with Mladic,” argued Radislav Krstic, the corps commander of the forces that controlled this part of eastern Bosnia, where the slaughter unfolded.

Through much of the 16 years Mladic was in hiding, evidence has been accumulating in the case files of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal of his key role in genocidal crimes in Bosnia, as one after another of his subordinates were sent to prison.

In one sense, Mladic has already been tried by proxy. His name figures large in the testimony and documents at the trials of Bosnian Serb army officers, including Krstic and three others who have been convicted of genocide-related charges for the mass killings in Bosnia.