SERBIA & MONTENEGRO: Senior Serb officials are negotiating the surrender of Gen Ratko Mladic, Bosnian media reported yesterday, amid warnings from the West that failure to catch fugitive war criminals before Christmas would see Belgrade cast into diplomatic isolation.
"Attempts had been made to establish contact with the fugitive over the past few months," Nezavisne Novine newspaper quoted a source in the Bosnian Serb interior ministry as saying, adding it believed Gen Mladic was the man in question.
"Some 10 days ago, contact was finally established and intensive negotiations on his surrender have begun," the source revealed.
Radovan Pejic, a spokesman for the Bosnian Serb police, also declared: "Something which might cheer up the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina is taking place in Belgrade, something which could speed up its European integration."
The European Union and NATO have been reluctant to strengthen ties with Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia while war crimes suspects are still at large.
Gen Mladic and his chief political ally during the 1992-5 Bosnian war, Radovan Karadzic, were indicted by the UN tribunal at The Hague over the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in the town of Srebrenica. Gen Mladic is believed to be hiding in Serbia; Mr Karadzic is thought to be somewhere in Bosnia or his native Montenegro.
After talks last Friday with the president of the UN court, Serb defence minister Zoran Stankovic said: "Unless Mladic is in The Hague by a certain deadline, we will be excommunicated from Euro-Atlantic integration . . . If we do not fulfil this obligation by the end of this year, the citizens of this country will see some very difficult moments."
Meanwhile, politicians from the two Bosnian "mini-states" created by the Dayton accord - Republika Srpska and a Muslim-Croat federation - met this weekend to discuss a new constitution to simplify the country's complex and wasteful structure. US mediator Donald Hays said the talks could be tricky.
"If this were easy, we wouldn't need negotiations," he said.
