PARIS — Bosnian public television has broadcast amateur videos of Europe’s most wanted fugitive, the Bosnian war commander Gen. Ratko Mladic, partying with friends and family in Serbia, contradicting years of official claims from the government there that he had disappeared without a trace.
Easily recognizable, Mr. Mladic, looking like his stocky, assured self, is seen surrounded by people at a restaurant, dancing at a wedding and cooing to a baby. Most important, the television host said, some of the videos show Mr. Mladic playing table tennis at Serbian military barracks; it has long been rumored that the former general spent time at a military base.
The show’s producer, Bakir Hadzjomerovic, declined to say how the video clips were obtained, but he said they covered a period of more than 10 years, with some images taken perhaps in the past two years. The producer said that the oldest date from 1994, showing Mr. Mladic attending the funeral of his daughter, who killed herself during the Bosnian war, but that all other material was taken after 1995, when the war ended and a United Nations tribunal demanded Mr. Mladic’s arrest on charges of war crimes and genocide.
Mr. Mladic has been indicted in the killings of some 8,000 captive Bosnian men and boys near the town of Srebrenica in July 1995, the largest single mass murder in Europe since World War II.
In Belgrade, the Serbian capital, government officials tried to make light of the videos, which appeared on the Internet after some still shots from them were published in local newspapers. Rasim Ljajic, in charge of Serbia’s cooperation with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, confirmed that the videos were of Mr. Mladic, but he said that “not a single shot is less than eight years old.”
Like others before it, this government — which came to power in Belgrade last year — insists that it is looking hard for Mr. Mladic, a war hero to many nationalists.
Mr. Ljajic said the videos were “seized in Mladic’s house in December 2008 and handed to The Hague tribunal in March this year.”
He said he would investigate how and why the videos appeared in public now. The broadcast comes at a critical political moment for Serbia. On Monday, foreign ministers of the European Union are due to discuss whether Serbia is cooperating sufficiently with the tribunal to allow for further steps in its bid to join the union. If the answer is yes, it would trigger release of significant financial assistance, ease visa restrictions and lead to other advantages.
Most of the 27 union members are in favor of rewarding the moderate Belgrade government, which, soon after taking office, arrested the former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, another longtime fugitive, and sent him to The Hague. But the Netherlands and Belgium are expected to continue blocking the agreement. The Dutch, whose peacekeepers were overrun at Srebrenica at the time of the massacre, have argued that Europe should not give up its strongest political lever to obtain the arrest of Mr. Mladic.
The general’s peaceful life in Belgrade was confirmed, by coincidence, in a local court on Tuesday.
Branislav Puhalo testified that he belonged to a unit of about 50 heavily armed men that guarded him from 1997 to 2002. He said on government orders the unit protected Mladic “from criminals and bounty hunters.”
“It was all legal, Mr. Puhalo said. “We went to soccer matches, to the police headquarters, to restaurants.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/world/europe/12mladic.html?ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print
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