Mladic's run from justice "hobbles" Serbia, prosecutor says

Sep 25, 2009, 8:55 GMT

Belgrade - Serbia has been politically and economically 'hobbled' because it has failed to bring remaining war crime suspects to justice, the country's war crimes prosecutor said in an interview published Friday.

The prosecutor, Vladimir Vuckovic, said Serbia is 'very late' in capturing the fugitives from the United Nations war crimes tribunal, the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and the Croatian Serb insurgency leader Goran Hadzic.

'Serbia is gagging and is hobbling, politically, morally and economically, because of those two men,' Vukcevic told the Press, a daily newspaper. 'The (rest of the) region is joining European and global integration flows, while we wander through the past.'

His remarks came a day after Rasim Ljajic, the head of the Serbian task force in charge of capturing Mladic and Hadzic, said he would resign if the fugitives are not caught by the end of the year.

Asked if he too would resign if if Mladic and Hadzic continued to elude arrest, Vukcevic, who is also a member of the task force, said he would 'not run from responsibility.'

Mladic, the Bosnian Serb wartime military chief, is wanted on genocide charges for such crimes as the massacre of 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995, months before the war ended.

Hadzic was the premier of a self-proclaimed Serb republic on Croatian soil held responsible for persecution, murder, forcible deportation and other crimes against non-Serbs.

The arrest of the two remaining fugitives from the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia is the crucial condition for unblocking Serbia's bid to join the European Union.