Mladic extradited to Hague as final appeal rejected
The 69-year-old arrived in Rotterdam on a Serbian government jet last night. After 90 minutes at the airport, where he was kept out of sight, Mladic was transferred by helicopter to the tribunal’s detention centre near The Hague. Following standard procedure, he was kept in isolation last night. It was unclear when he would actually face the court.
Mladic was indicted by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia over the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
He was arrested on Thursday in a farmhouse belonging to a cousin and extradited after losing his final legal appeal in Belgrade earlier in the day.
The Yugoslavia tribunal confirmed in a statement that Mladic had been transferred to the detention unit.
It said a panel of judges would be appointed and Mladic would appear in court “without delay.”
His arrest triggered protests by Serb ultra-nationalists in Serbia and Bosnia, but the swift extradition is expected to smooth Serbia’s progress toward European Union membership. Brussels had insisted on Mladic’s capture and transfer to the court as a condition for candidacy.
Mladic’s last day in Serbia began with a police-escorted visit to the grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.
During a prison visit on Monday, he met his five-year-old grandson and his 10-year-old granddaughter.
His wife and son paid a final visit to the prison before he was dispatched to Belgrade airport.
Serbia’s war crimes court rejected earlier yesterday an appeal against Mladic’s extradition to The Hague, where wartime Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic is already on trial. Mladic’s lawyer and family had argued he was mentally unstable and too sick to be extradited.
His arrest exposed the ethnic tensions that continue to divide Bosnia, where he fought to create a separate Serb entity with the backing of then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic died in his UN tribunal cell in 2006.
Bosnia is made up of a Serb Republic and a Muslim-Croat Federation under a weak central government.
Around 10,000 Bosnian Serbs pledged support for Mladic in the Serb Republic capital Banja Luka. Buses arrived from across the Serb Republic, many filled with his former soldiers. “There are more Mladics in Serbia, they grow and will continue where he stopped,” said Srdjan Nogo of ultra-nationalist organisation Srpske Dveri.
Such sentiments alarmed Muslims in Bosnia.
“Night after night I shiver in fear that someone may come and force us leave the house and shoot at us,” said Emina Bajric, 72, a pensioner from Banja Luka.
“We have been through such an ordeal once and I am not sure if I could go through it again.”
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