'Noose tightening' around war crimes fugitive
He once declared that he was God, and ordered his Serb artillery to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslims in Sarajevo.
General Ratko Mladic kept a goat he called Madeleine Albright, and until a few years ago, openly dined at fancy Belgrade restaurants or watched soccer matches.
Now, Serbian authorities say the noose is tightening around the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander, a top UN war crimes fugitive, who’s been eluding capture for nearly a decade on charges he helped mastermind Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since the Second World War.
Although Serbian police today denied reports that Mladic’s exact location has been located, they said that the authorities were intensively working to find him and extradite him to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
Serbia’s media claimed that Mladic has already been located “in a large town” outside Belgrade and that his arrest was imminent.
“The government will no longer hesitate to arrest and extradite” Mladic to the UN tribunal, the prominent Belgrade Danas daily said. “The only dilemma is how to conduct the operation so there will be no casualties and that Mladic stays alive.”
Mladic’s security once said the general had made a death pact with one of his bodyguards to shoot him in the event he is ever cornered by authorities.
Mladic disappeared from public view here when Serbia’s conservative Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica – lured by promises that Serbia will one day become an European Union member, but only if Mladic is arrested – earlier this year shifted his opposition toward The Hague tribunal, and said: ”All those who committed war crimes must face justice.”
US Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said during a visit to Belgrade that Mladic’s days as a war crimes fugitive may be numbered.
“It’s our very strong hope that Serbia will now take the final steps to send General Mladic to The Hague to have him put on trial for the crimes he directed in the murder of 8,000 men and boys of Srebrenica,” Burns said.
“We hope his days in relative freedom are numbered,” he said, after being briefed by Serbia’s top officials.
Western diplomats in Belgrade believe Mladic was recently moving between Serbia and the Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia protected by a “security ring” of about 50 heavily armed loyalists.
They say that when in Serbia, Mladic hides out in one of numerous well-guarded army compounds or at homes of retired former Bosnian Serb army aides and hardline nationalists who still consider him their icon and wartime hero.
Ruthless wartime commander Mladic was indicted in 1995 for Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since the second World War: the slaughter of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.
What happened there, a UN judge wrote later, involved “scenes from hell … written on the darkest pages of human history.”
A UN “safe haven” for Muslims, Srebrenica ended up overrun by Serbs who separated the men and boys, forced them to strip, executed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves in a brutal rampage that lasted for more than a week, a UN war crimes indictment against him says.
Mladic, 62, was in 1995 indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity together with former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who vanished that year. Karadzic reportedly has been hiding in disguise and on the move in remote and mountainous corners of the Balkans.
The Srebrenica survivors say one image forever will be imprinted in their minds: Mladic handing out sweets to Muslim children who had been rounded up on the town’s square and reassuring them that everything would be all right – even patting one child on the head.
Convinced of the power of his army, he used to tell his soldiers: “When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God,” or tell air-operators to clear the way for his helicopter by saying: “Here speaks Ratko Mladic – The Serbian God.”
Carried away by Serb dominance in firepower and international ignorance during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, Mladic believed in his final victory and did not choose means to achieve it.
He turned his artillery toward civilian targets, cities and villages, established concentration camps for detained civilians and enemy soldiers alike and ordered systematic executions of prisoners, according to the war crimes indictment.
Sarajevans still remember his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992. He issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble the signal, which was picked up and taped by the Sarajevo police’s signal intelligence work equipment. The next day, his commands were broadcast on TV.
“Turn toward Velesici, there are no Serbs there,” Sarajevans could hear Mladic ordering his artillery to pound this Sarajevan suburb.
“Scorch their brains,” he told his gunmen.
