EU pushes for justice in Serbia

"NATO and the US were deeply reluctant to get involved in the process of apprehending war criminals - there was a great fear that if they went after these guys, [troops] would be killed and it would turn into a Somalia," says Tufts University international relations professor Bruce Hitchner, who has chaired the Dayton Peace Accords Project since the mid-1990s.

Several years later, the EU began issuing travel bans and international agencies in Bosnia began freezing the assets of people thought to be affiliated with fugitives. And both NATO and the Union have made memberships in their exclusive clubs depend on cooperation with the tribunal.

Mr. Lyon of ICG says it's likely the EU will suspend negotiations with Serbia next week if Mladic is not apprehended by then. Such a move would be more than a slap on the wrist, he notes. Suspended talks would make foreign investors think twice; suspended talks could also rupture Serbia's governing coalition, as one party has already threatened to walk if the talks stall.

Suspension would also likely echo outside Serbia's borders. The country is currently in UN-mediated talks over the future of Serbia's Kosovo province - under UN control since 1999 - and the international community could have little sympathy for Serbia's claims if Serbia can't arrest suspects within its own borders.

Serbia's junior republic of Montenegro is also clamoring for independence from Serbia; a suspension could mean a larger wave of pro-independence voters in Montenegro at the planned springtime poll.

But Lyon applauds the EU's toughness, and says suspending talks could be the tip of the iceberg if Serbia doesn't cooperate.

"We want to know why they weren't threatening like this three years ago and four years ago," he says. "Besides simply cutting off negotiations, later on down the road they could do other things like removing trade preferences."

The Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal on two counts of genocide for a 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim males in Srebrenica in July 1995.

• He went underground in 2001 after his protector, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, was toppled. The tribunal said General Mladic was in Serbia. NATO said he had visited his old bunker in Bosnia in 2004 to drink with friends, under the noses of police.

• Mladic was born in the village of Bozanovici in southern Bosnia on March 12, 1942, the son of a partisan killed by pro-Nazi Croatian troops in 1945. As a child he wanted to be a teacher, but he went to the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, for military studies and was one of the top graduates.

• He began his Army career in 1965, becoming a brigadier over 20 years - a slow rate of progress that colleagues attributed to an undisciplined manner. He spent most of his career in Macedonia, with short stays in Croatia and Kosovo.

• On May 15, 1992 - with Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims fighting for control of multiethnic Bosnia - Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic made Mladic commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, a position he held until December 1996.

• With the arrest of Croatian war crimes fugitive Ante Gotovina in December 2005, the full force of international diplomatic pressure focused on Serbia, held responsible for Mladic and five other fugitives still at large.

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