Is Serbia Serious About Arresting Mladic?

Thursday, 11 November, 2010

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Merdijana Sadović

Senior Project Manager

Ahead of his visit, Serbian authorities launched two search operations and increased the reward for the capture of both men.

Merdijana Sadovic, IWPR's ICTY programme manager, considers Serbia's commitment to the Hague tribunal and its hopes for EU accession.

Brammertz and his predecessors have visited Belgrade many times, and it seems that ahead of each visit there is a flurry of activity in the hunt for the fugitives. Is there a danger that this is becoming a circus?

It is evident that activities related to the search for the former Bosnian Serb army chief, Ratko Mladic, always intensify before reports on Serbia’s cooperation with the Hague tribunal are due to be submitted by the tribunal’s chief prosecutor to the United Nations Security Council.

Serbia’s prospects of joining the European Union will only be given real momentum once the Hague tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, says Belgrade is fully cooperating with his office.

Belgrade claims that it is consistently searching for Mladic and former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic, but the timing of these operations naturally raises doubts about its intentions; the majority seem to be carried out when Serbia needs to persuade the international community that it’s cooperating fully with the tribunal and deserves to be rewarded by being allowed to continue EU accession talks.

The latest search operation was carried out on November 2, less than two weeks before Brammertz was due to visit Belgrade for his report, which will be presented to the Security Council on December 6.

Unsurprisingly, the operation was described by some observers as just a media show aimed at putting Serbia in a good light ahead of Brammertz’s visit.

So far, more than two dozen search operations related to Mladic have been conducted, but have failed to yield any significant results. The only useful thing Serbian police have unearthed was during a search in February this year in which they found Mladic’s wartime diaries, consisting of over 100 sound recordings as well as handwritten notebooks, cell phone cards, memory sticks and various other documents.

Prosecutors expect these diaries – now in the possession of the tribunal - to provide evidence of alleged top-level coordination between Bosnian Serb and Serbian military forces, something both have dismissed as having no foundation. .  

Is there a sense that Serbia is actually protecting Mladic and that the government could really deliver him if they wanted to?

There is no reason to believe that the current Serbian government is not prepared to hand over Mladic to the tribunal if it gets hold of him. Serbian president Boris Tadic is aware that the EU will not easily give up its policy of conditionality and pressure and allow Serbia to join before Mladic and Hadzic are arrested. European enlargement commissioner Stefan Fuele reiterated this week that cooperation with the tribunal remains the main pre-condition for Serbia’s progress towards accession. Several EU countries, particularly the Netherlands, have routinely sought to withhold incentives from Belgrade until full cooperation on Mladic is seen.

Unlike his predecessor Vojislav Kostunica, Tadic has said repeatedly that Mladic and Hadzic must be detained and sent to The Hague.

“If they are on Serbian soil, they will be captured,” Tadic said last year. “This is our obligation.”

In the years following the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the Belgrade authorities openly protected Mladic. Under the rule of the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Mladic is said to have led almost a normal life. He was spotted attending weddings, funerals and even football games in Belgrade and other locations in Serbia.

There was no political will to arrest Mladic. But that changed when Tadic became Serbia’s president. Even the tribunal acknowledges that.

But the question is whether the Serbian government is capable of carrying out such a task. Some observers doubt that Belgrade officials will be able to break through the impenetrable defence that the Serbian secret police have allegedly built around Mladic.

Under the Milosevic regime, the secret police were responsible for recruiting paramilitary fighters who became notorious for war crimes and political assassinations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia. To this day, the Balkans remains plagued by corruption, with crime networks created under Milosevic still in operation.

Some analysts believe that the secret behind Mladic’s 15 years of freedom lies within the unreformed secret services, which are essentially unchanged since the time of their creation. After Milosevic’s arrest in 2001, the Department of State Security, as it was known, was renamed the Bureau of Security and Information, BIA. But it remained inscrutable to most Serbs, even top Serbian officials.

Many believe there are operatives within the secret services who are withholding crucial information about Mladic’s new identity – if he has one – and his whereabouts. These same operatives are believed to be tipping Mladic off on all operations aimed at his arrest before they are carried out.

Even the Serbian war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, does not rule out the possibility that certain members of the BIA may be responsible for actively protecting Mladic.

Serbian military officials are also believed to have helped Mladic evade justice over the years. This month, Serbian police launched another investigation into allegations that a number of high-ranking army officials provided Mladic with logistical support from 2000 until 2003.

Since 2005, more than a dozen people have been brought to trial for allegedly helping Mladic escape arrest. However, all were either acquaintances or relatives of the fugitive army commander - none were from the BIA. No-one has ever been convicted of helping the fugitive suspects. 

Is there a risk that handing Mladic over would provoke a serious national backlash?

Although Mladic still has a lot of supporters in Serbia - a recent poll indicated that more than half the population does not agree that it’s in Serbia’s best interest to send him to the tribunal - that doesn’t mean that his arrest would jeopardise the country’s stability. The best proof of that is the July 2008 arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which didn’t cause any rifts within Serbian society, despite the public support he enjoyed. 

Serbia has actually done a great deal to cooperate with the tribunal and has sent a number of suspects to The Hague – isn’t that sufficient to demonstrate that it is serious? Will the EU really never yield to Serbian accession until Mladic has been caught?

Serbia will eventually have to be allowed to join the EU – its membership cannot be postponed forever. Also, there is a risk that too hard a line taken by the EU could undermine Serbia’s pro-European government, helping less constructive forces in the country and potentially destabilising a troubled region.

But EU conditionality is the only leverage the international community has in Serbia - without that, it’s very likely that the search for Mladic would not be a seen as a priority. There is a good chance that softening attitudes in the EU would allow Mladic to walk free, or at least escape international trial.

No one in the international community doubts that the current Serbian government is serious when it says it wants to see Mladic being brought to justice. But that’s not the same as actually arresting him and sending him to The Hague.