Del Ponte: EU moet druk zetten op uitlevering oorlogsmisdadigers door Servië (en)
EUOBSERVER/BRUSSELS - The EU i should refrain from establishing closer ties with Serbia until remaining war crimes suspects, notably general Ratko Mladic, have been handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), its chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte has said.
The EU could be "the extremely important element" that would lead to the arrest of the remaining fugitives, Ms Del Ponte said during a conference organised by Brussels-based think tank Friends of Europe on Tuesday (4 December).
"Unfortunately, experience shows us that the Balkan countries were fully cooperating with us [ICTY] if the EU was pressuring them - and there must be the same treatment also with Serbia", she pointed out.
"What's important is that he [Ratko Mladic] ends up in The Hague, in January or February, but certainly before signing [the Stabilisation and Association Agreement between the EU and Serbia]. Because, if we lose that lever, it will never happen", Ms Del Ponte stressed.
The EU initialled the so-called Stabilisation and Association Agreement - a first step towards eventual EU membership - with Belgrade on 7 November, but the actual signing of the document will only happen once Brussels has been told that Serbia is cooperating fully with the war crimes court.
The prosecutor, who had just come back from her last visit in Belgrade before the end of her term in office, reiterated her conviction that one of the most important remaining fugitives, former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic, is currently in Serbia.
"We now know where Mladic is. Mladic is there, in Serbia. All the indications, all the evidence that were collected by the national authorities prove that he is there", she stressed.
General Mladic was the chief of staff of the army of Republika Srpska - the Serbian entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina - in the 1991-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He has been indicted by the ICTY on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide after a massacre in 1995 of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the small town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Other important war crimes suspects that the country has been criticised for failing to hand over include the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, former Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic and Bosnian Serb police commander Stojan Zupljanin.
Speaking at the same conference, Serbian deputy prime minister Bojidar Djelic contested the accusation that there is a lack of will to cooperate with the UN court and insisted that his country was doing its best to locate and arrest the war crimes indictees.
Ms Del Ponte who has been the ICTY's chief prosecutor since 1999 will present her last report assessing Belgrade's cooperation with The Hague-based tribunal on 10 December at the United Nations, before stepping down as UN prosecutor.
She is to be succeeded by her Belgian deputy Serge Brammertz in January.
The ICTY was established by a United Nations resolution in 1993 to prosecute people having committed violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia since 1 January 1991. It aims at ending all cases and closing its doors by 2010.