Belgrade - The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz, arrived in Belgrade Monday to press Serbian officials for the arrest of Ratko Mladic, the most wanted war crimes suspect. But Belgrade, despite its ties with the European Union hinging on the arrest of fugitive war criminals, has again said Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime military chief, is out of its reach.
"We have no trail leading to Mladic, only if a miracle should happen," Serbian minister in charge of cooperation with ICTY, Rasim Ljajic, said ahead of Brammertz's arrival.
Brammertz is to report Serbia's compliance to the United Nations in December, with the EU also closely watching. Brussels has suspended an already signed pre-membership deal with Serbia and is unlikely to unfreeze it without Mladic on trial at The Hague-based tribunal.
Ljajic said Serbia has not had any information of Mladic's whereabouts since the first half of 2006, but admitted "it could be assumed" that he was hiding in the country.
Mladic, is held responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity. He personally commanded the operations in Srebrenica in July 1995, when 8,000 Muslim boys and men were executed.
He moved freely in Serbia after the Bosnian war ended in late 1995 and went underground after Slobodan Milosevic's regime fell in October 2000.
In early 2006, after denying it for more than five years, Belgrade admitted its military "had undeniably on occasion sheltered" Mladic until 2002 at "army facilities" and that retired army officers were still assisting him.
Sporadic police raids, as the one last week in a town 70 kilometres southwest of Belgrade, came up with nothing.
Expectations of Mladic's arrest rose after the July arrest of his political leader, Radovan Karadzic, who had been living under life under a false identity in Belgrade. The authorities had claimed that Karadzic was hiding in Bosnian mountains.
Ljajic said he was expecting the Karadzic arrest and cooperation through the delivery of requested archive material to the ICTY to bring positive points to Brammertz's report, but that without Mladic facing justice it would not be enough.
Apart from Mladic, only one more suspect indicted by the ICTY remains at large, the Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.
Brammertz was due to meet Ljajic and police, intelligence and prosecution executives Tuesday and see Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic and other government officials the next day.
