Mladic issue could freeze Serbia out

European Union foreign ministers in Brussels today threatened to freeze talks with Serbia on its EU membership bid, setting an end-of-March deadline for Belgrade to hand over top fugitive Ratko Mladic.

European Union foreign ministers in Brussels today threatened to freeze talks with Serbia on its EU membership bid, setting an end-of-March deadline for Belgrade to hand over top fugitive Ratko Mladic.

EU officials said EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn warned Belgrade that talks scheduled for April could be postponed if Mladic had not been handed over for trial at the UN war crimes tribunal.

Rehn, who is leading EU talks with Belgrade on a pre-membership aid-and-trade deal, had set an informal end-of-February deadline for Belgrade to fully co-operate.

“It means that there is some more time until the end of March” for them to cooperate with the tribunal, said Rehn spokeswoman Krisztina Nagy.

Nagy said Rehn told the EU foreign ministers that if no progress had been made before the next round of negotiations, planned for April 5, those talks could be frozen.

EU foreign ministers called on both Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia to “take resolute measures … to bring to justice” Mladic and other top war crimes suspect, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the EU had to get tough with Belgrade, just as it did with Croatia last year, to hand over indicted war criminals.

“The message has to be unless these countries such as Serbia cooperate with the criminal tribunal in The Hague, and hand over indicted war criminals, they cannot expect the full co-operation from the European Union in return,” said Straw.

Rehn and Austria’s Foreign Minister, Ursula Plassnik, whose country holds the EU presidency, were to meet with Serbia-Montenegro’s Foreign Minister, Vuk Draskovic, later today to discuss his country’s co-operation with the UN tribunal.

Last week, media reported authorities were closing in on Mladic, but he remains at large.

Mladic and Karadzic were indicted in 1995 on charges of orchestrating the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in the UN enclave of Srebrenica – Europe’s worst carnage since the Second World War.

Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia under protection of hard-liners in the Serb military and police, loyalists of the former autocratic President Slobodan Milosevic, ousted in 2000 by a reformist coalition.

Karadzic reportedly has been hiding and moving between Bosnia, Serbia and his native Montenegro.

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