Del Ponte visits Sarajevo

Del Ponte visits Sarajevo

Del Ponte met Bosnia's top international administrator, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, and will hold talks later Thursday with the three members of Bosnia's shared presidency.

Her visit comes a day after NATO leaders at a summit in Riga, Latvia, invited Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina to join a cooperation program that is a first step toward possible membership in the military alliance.

Serbia and Bosnia previously were excluded from NATO's Partnership for Peace program because of their failure to apprehend the two leading war crimes suspects indicted by the U.N. tribunal for the former Yugoslavia: former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and his wartime military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladić.

Del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, on Wednesday said she opposed NATO's invitation to Serbia, which she has repeatedly accused of failing to cooperate with the search for Mladic. She said through her spokesman that she was "surprised and disappointed" by the decision.

"The prosecutor is highly surprised because she was not consulted," Anton Nikiforov said on Wednesday. "She is disappointed because it turns out that Serbia was rewarded for its noncooperation with the tribunal."

Mladić and possibly also Karadžić are believed to be hiding in Serbia. Officials in Belgrade, under pressure from the European Union to hand over war crimes suspects, insist they are doing all they can to arrest them.

Both men were indicted on genocide charges in 1995 for allegedly orchestrating the massacre of as many as 8,000 Muslims in the U.N. enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia — Europe's worst carnage since World War II.