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Top War Crimes Suspect Negotiating for Surrender
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The killings in and around Srebrenica were the worst such atrocity in Europe since World War II. Bodies were buried in mass graves along a 50-mile stretch of countryside. Ever since, forensics experts have been working to identify the dead by comparing DNA samples with samples from relatives and have been able to name about 1,000 victims.
The government has moved cautiously in Mladic's case and others because of Kostunica's political concerns, officials said. The largest single political group in the country, the Radical Party, last week called for an end to "anti-Serb" hysteria over Srebrenica.
Officials said Kostunica is trying to avoid an armed assault on Mladic. And they asserted that his subtle approach has been successful.
Last October, Ljubisa Beara, a colonel in the security force during the government of former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, surrendered and traveled to The Hague. The trial of Milosevic at The Hague is ongoing.
Beara had been in hiding since his 2002 indictment on charges of taking part in actions "to capture, detain, summarily execute by firing squad, bury and rebury thousands of Bosnian Moslem men and boys aged 16 to 60 from the Srebrenica area in the period from 12 to about 19 July 1995."
In January, government officials announced they were nearing "a serious breakthrough in negotiations" with major war crimes suspects. Shortly afterwards, Vladimir Lazarevic, a general during the war in the Serbian province of Kosovo, surrendered directly to Kostunica, who welcomed the move. Lazarevic got an official send-off and traveled to the Netherlands in a government-supplied plane in the company of two ministers.
His surrender set off a chain reaction. Milan Gvero, deputy commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the war, gave himself up. Then came other high-ranking officers and officials, among them Gen. Radivoj Miletic; Gen. Momcilo Peresic, who was head of the Yugoslav armed forces; Mico Stanisic, the interior minister of the self-proclaimed Serb Republic inside Bosnia; Drago Nikolic, Bosnian Serb army chief of security; and Serbian police general Sreten Lukic.
One diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, described Kostunica's strategy of coaxing surrenders as a means of building pressure on Mladic and eventually Karadzic. It stands in contrast to the past, when Kostunica resisted sending suspects to The Hague. "The atmosphere has definitely changed," the diplomat said.
