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The Failure to Arrest Ratko Mladic

In the ten years since the end of war in Bosnia, Ratko Mladic is believed to have divided his time between Bosnia and Serbia, spending the majority of the first half in Bosnia and the second half in Serbia, and moving occasionally from one country to the other. Responsibility for the failure to bring him to justice during the late 1990s lies primarily with the authorities of the Republika Srpska and NATO forces. In the past five years, primary responsibility falls on the government of Serbia.

Mladic in Bosnia (1996-2000)

In the first year after the war, Ratko Mladic was still the Republika Srpska Army Chief of Staff. He left the post in December 1996, two months after his dismissal by president of Republika Srpska, Biljana Plavsic.⁸¹ Mladic lived in the southeast part of Bosnia, in the French sector of SFOR, for the following three or four years.⁸² NATO made no attempt to arrest Mladic while he was still resident in Bosnia, and only one attempt during his subsequent visits to Bosnia after moving to Serbia.

U.S. military intelligence officers told U.S. News and World Report in 1996 that Mladic was fairly easy to track because he traveled with a radio in his vehicle. Two U.S. military sources also told the magazine that “for at least the first six months of the NATO mission, high‑ranking officers were in regular contact with Mladic, making sure that he understood the requirements of military implementation of the Dayton peace agreement.”⁸³

Reported sightings of Mladic in Bosnia became less frequent after 1997. He did not hesitate to appear in public in Serbia and Montenegro, however. In 1997, for example, he spent a week's holiday in the Montenegrin coast and held a party for 300 guests in Belgrade for his son's wedding.⁸⁴

Denials from Serbia (2000-2005)

In 2000, the international media reported that Mladic had settled in Serbia,⁸⁵ while continuing to visit Bosnia. Initially, Mladic lived in a secluded villa in the Banovo Brdo neighborhood of Belgrade, protected by a dozen security guards who were paid from a fund set up by local businesses and former army associates.⁸⁶ During 2000, Mladic apparently moved from Belgrade to Valjevo, in Serbia’s central-west, and was living there when opposition parties in Serbia removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in October that year.⁸⁷ There is no credible information available about Mladic’s exact whereabouts in Serbia since 2001. It appears, nevertheless, that throughout this period Mladic was protected by elements of the army in Serbia that lie outside the effective control of the government.⁸⁸ 

For more than a year after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic (in October 2000), the new Serbian authorities argued that they lacked the political power to arrest Mladic. In interviews with two German newspapers (Der Spiegel and Frankfurter Rundschau) in February and April 2002, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said that Serbia was not capable of arresting Mladic because the risk of unrest was too high.⁸⁹ The president of the National Council for Cooperation with the ICTY, foreign minister Goran Svilanovic, made a similar argument in January 2003, claiming that even if Mladic was in the country, his arrest was beyond the abilities of the state agencies.⁹⁰

During 2001, some high-ranking officials claimed that Mladic was not in Serbia, but other officials eventually acknowledged that he had been in Serbia during that year. The interior minister of Serbia, Zoran Zivkovic, reportedly told a press conference in July 2001 that Ratko Mladic did not live in Serbia.⁹¹ In May 2002, however, the new interior minister Dusan Mihajlovic, said that Mladic left the territory of Serbia “several months earlier”—clearly implying that Mladic had recently been in Serbia.⁹² Another minister in the Serbian government, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press in March 2002 that Mladic had been living off-and-on in Serbia since 1996, and was still there—another statement implying that during 2001 Mladic was in Serbia.⁹³ The contradictory statements coming from the Serbian officials in 2001 and 2002 made it difficult for the international community to believe the government’s subsequent claims about Mladic’s whereabouts.

The official line of the authorities in Serbia since early 2002 has been that Ratko Mladic either is not in Serbia, or his whereabouts are unknown. As mentioned above, Dusan Mihajlovic claimed in May 2002 that Mladic had left the territory of Serbia several months earlier.⁹⁴ However, some Serbian officials occasionally departed from the official position and suggested that Mladic might be in Serbia, under the protection of the army. Nenad Canak, the parliamentary speaker of the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina, said in December 2002 that Mladic was living in Serbia with the government's knowledge.⁹⁵ Defense minister of Serbia and Montenegro Boris Tadic claimed in mid-2003 that, while he was receiving assurances from the Main Army Staff that the army was not hiding Mladic, he could not exclude the possibility that some “surprising information” might emerge.⁹⁶ Current foreign minister of Serbia Vuk Draskovic said in April 2005 that he believed Mladic was hiding with the help of Serbian security services.⁹⁷ 

The current Serbian government of prime-minister Vojislav Kostunica, formed in early 2004, has claimed that it has no information about Mladic’s presence in Serbia. In June 2005, Rasim Ljajic, a government minister and president of the National Council for Cooperation with the ICTY, denied reports in the Serbian press about the government’s negotiations with Mladic about surrender, blaming journalists for creating a false impression that the government knew where Mladic was.⁹⁸ The same month, other Serbian government officials implied negotiation efforts were underway (see “speculations about arrest” section below).

Allegations about Mladic’s Whereabouts in Serbia (2002-2005)

Reported sightings of Mladic in recent years, coupled with claims by the ICTY prosecutor that Mladic is in Serbia, call into question the credibility of the government’s denials. Since 2002, the office of the ICTY prosecutor has consistently claimed that Mladic continues to live in Serbia. In November 2002, a source close to the ICTY chief prosecutor told the Washington Post that there was credible evidence that on October 21 Mladic had dined with friends at a restaurant in the Topcider district of Belgrade.⁹⁹ The dinner took place as the prosecutor was meeting U.S. and European diplomats at the nearby Swiss ambassador's residence to discuss her efforts to capture Mladic. Also in November 2002, ICTY prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said that five months earlier she had given the responsible Interior Ministry in Belgrade “exact information on where Mladic would be at a particular point. But nothing happened.”¹⁰⁰ In January 2003, Del Ponte told a Swiss newspaper that Mladic was receiving medical assistance in a military hospital in Belgrade, and had visited another ICTY indictee in the same hospital, the latter having been provisionally released from the Hague detention due to ill health.¹⁰¹ When Del Ponte visited Belgrade in early March 2003, she said that “even the officials in Belgrade do not deny anymore that Mladic is in Serbia.”¹⁰² 

The Belgrade newspaper Danas recently carried an interview with a former member of the Army of Serbia and Montenegro, detailing the army’s involvement in protecting Mladic in 2004. Miroslav D. Petrovic, a military deserter currently hiding in a United States military base in a neighboring country, told Danas that his task in the army had been to ensure a safe passage for Mladic from Serbia to Macedonia, should Mladic decide to flee there. Petrovic was entrusted with this task as someone who had worked in the area and knew it well.¹⁰³ Petrovic told Danas that in June 2004 he saw Mladic in the military compound Topcider, in Belgrade.¹⁰⁴   

The army responded to Petrovic’s allegation with unusual promptness, issuing a public statement on the same day the Danas article was published. In the statement, the army claimed that Petrovic had a “problematic” personality, was an alcoholic, and made the allegation in order to achieve personal celebrity.¹⁰⁵ The ad-hominem nature of the criticism against Petrovic only strengthened suspicions about the army’s role in protecting the ICTY fugitive.

Citing intelligence sources in Bosnia, Sarajevo daily Dnevni avaz reported in early May 2005 that Mladic was hiding in an army compound in Pancevo, Serbia.¹⁰⁶ Around the same time, the United States ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro, Michael Polt, stated that the United States believed Mladic was still in Serbia.¹⁰⁷

Brief Return to His Wartime Base in Bosnia (June/July 2004)

In June and July 2004, according to EUFOR and the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ratko Mladic was hiding in an underground military bunker in the village of Veliki Zep, near Han Pijesak in Republika Srpska. Mladic allegedly left Serbia after it elected a pro-western President, Boris Tadic, in June 2004.¹⁰⁸

In an apparent reference to Han Pijesak, General David Leakey, the British commander of the European Union Force (EUFOR), said in a December 2004 interview that Mladic “visited his wartime base outside Sarajevo around June 28 to celebrate the Bosnian Serb Army holiday with his pals.” According to Leakey, NATO troops raided the base on July 2, but failed to find him there.¹⁰⁹ Dnevni avaz reported that information about the planned EUFOR raid was leaked to Mladic, and he left the Bosnian territory for neighboring Montenegro.¹¹⁰ The Times (London) reported that Mladic slipped the net with the help of members of the Bosnian Serb military.¹¹¹

The Bosnian Ministry of Defense carried out an investigation into the allegations, and in January 2005 concluded that there was no evidence that Mladic had been present in the barracks near Han Pijesak.¹¹² The quality of the investigation was limited by the refusal of EUFOR, OHR and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), to submit intelligence data about the presence of Mladic in the area, ostensibly to protect security of their sources.¹¹³ As of January 2005, EUFOR and OHR continued to claim that Mladic had been present in the military complex near Han Pijesak in June 2004.¹¹⁴

Speculations about Arrest in Serbia (June 2005)

Since the beginning of June 2005, there have been multiple reports in the local and international media about negotiations between the authorities in Belgrade and Ratko Mladic over his surrender. Prominent Serbian daily, Danas, has been the prime source of this information, invoking well-placed sources close to the government. Although the government has denied the reports, highly-ranked officials hinted that Mladic’s arrest or surrender might occur in the near future. The Defense Minister of Serbia and Montenegro, Prvoslav Davinic, said on June 6 that he was sure “we will find him.”¹¹⁵ Serbian Minister of Justice, Zoran Stojkovic, followed this with a statement on June 9 that he was optimistic and hopeful that “we will do that in a relatively short period of time.”¹¹⁶ The pressure on the government in Belgrade to arrest Mladic intensified ahead of the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.