Nato presses for Mladic arrest
2005-07-18 11:52
Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro - Nato Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Monday was expected to press for the arrest of top war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic.
The extradition of the Bosnian Serb wartime commander to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, remains a key condition for Serbia-Montenegro to join Nato's Partnership for Peace - an outreach programme considered a stepping stone to full alliance membership.
De Hoop Scheffer was in Belgrade for talks with Svetozar Marovic, president of Serbia-Montenegro, Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic and Serbian President Boris Tadic.
Serbia-Montenegro, a loose two-member union that succeeded the former Yugoslavia, is struggling to build closer ties with the European Union and Nato after the 2000 ouster of former President Slobodan Milosevic.
Milosevic is now on trial before the UN court for war crimes and atrocities stemming from the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
Membership
The European Union has tentatively scheduled membership talks for Serbia-Montenegro for October, but only if Mladic is handed over to The Hague tribunal by then.
Amid increased international pressure to deliver Mladic and other suspects still at large, the Belgrade leadership recently stepped up pledges to hunt him down.
Mladic was charged by the UN tribunal with genocide for orchestrating the July 1995 slaughter of nearly 8 000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, Bosnia. He is believed to be hiding somewhere in Serbia, the union's dominant republic.
The other top suspect indicted in the Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic, also remains at large but is thought to be in the Serb part of Bosnia.
De Hoop Scheffer was also expected to discuss the southern Serbian province of Kosovo, which has been patrolled by Nato peacekeepers since the alliance's 1999 war halted Milosevic's crackdown on separatist ethnic Albanians and expelled Serb troops.
- AP