Eurasia Press & News
Serbia has more reasons now to be optimistic regarding the arrest of both remaining war crimes fugitives than a few months ago, said Rasim Ljajic, the country’s point man for cooperation with the Hague war crimes court.
“I’m much more optimistic regarding the arrest of Ratko Mladic now than until few months ago,” Ljajic said in an interview to Serbian daily Blic on Sunday. ” It is more likely Serbia will extradite both Goran Hadzic and Mladic than the Netherlands will give up its pressure.”
The Netherlands, where the U.N. war crimes tribunal is based, has said it will block Serbia’s EU path until all war crime suspects are handed over to The Hague. Bosnian Serb wartime army commander Mladic has been indicted for genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wartime leader, for crimes against humanity committed between 1991 and 1993 period during the war in Croatia.
“I believe Mladic will be in The Hague,” Ljajic said. “I cannot say how closer or further we are from Mladic, but we certainly have more arguments for optimism than in previous months. It would be a great surprise if we fail to finish that task this year. We are aware that without Mladic in The Hague, Serbia would spend long time in Europe’s waiting room.”
He said the security services have now more information on Mladic, including how his hiding has been organised and financed.
“Financiers, private businessmen that mainly came to Serbia from Bosnia after the war and opened their companies here, have ensured the money. The network organisers used to take the biggest portion for themselves, dozens of thousands euros, and they were giving small amount, few hundreds, to his direct security guards.”
Ljajic spoke also about relations with the United States saying The Hague was not any more an issue of dispute, but “what we have as a problem with Washington is the stance over Kosovo.” Relations between Serbia and the U.S. “are now on pretty law level. They are bad. And we have to improve those relations.”
Serbia is in a difficult situation, facing many problems, he said
“There’s not a single country that is exposed to such pressures like The Hague or Kosovo. On the top of that, now we have the parliament crisis. We have very thin majority in the parliament, and when you add to all that the severe economic crisis… To solve such problem we need a stable majority, which can be resolved only by new elections.”
