Locating Mladić “thankless task”

Rasim Ljajic says that it is difficult to claim that Hague fugitive Ratko Mladic is in Serbia. “Until he is located, it will be very thankless to claim that he is in Serbia or not,” said the president of the National Council for Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal in an interview with B92, adding that no one could say any longer that Serbia was not prepared to meet its obligations to the Tribunal. Locating Mladic “thankless task” He said that it appeared to him that “many in the international community who are ill-disposed” to Serbia took the news of Radovan Karadzic’s arrest with some reservation, and that others feared that Serbia would improve its international position and possibly “endanger some of their actions.” Asked who had arrested Karadzic, Ljajic said that it had been carried out by security service officials, and that this was no secret. He said that investigations were ongoing to see who had come into contact with Karadzic’s bag and laptop. “This is not a propaganda headquarters which makes things up to amuse the public or to deceive them. We state to the public what we receive as official information, of course, in the scale and detail that we are able to at that precise moment. Analyses are under way, they are not all complete. In a few days’ time, we will know exactly how many people came into contact with the bag and the items inside it,” the National Council president said. He said that he would be visiting Brussels in early September to meet with officials of the European Parliament. “We wish to honestly state everything that has been done and what the current problems are,” Ljajic said, speaking of Serbia’s cooperation with the Tribunal. He said that it was “realistic that there is no support for what we are doing from the public, but on the other hand, we have a very cold attitude from many EU officials as well.” Ljajic said that “the majority of the public is against cooperation with the Tribunal, not because people support war criminals, but because the Tribunal is very often unprincipled and because it has delivered very strange verdicts.”

Locating Mladić “thankless task”

He said that it appeared to him that “many in the international community who are ill-disposed” to Serbia took the news of Radovan Karadžić’s arrest with some reservation, and that others feared that Serbia would improve its international position and possibly “endanger some of their actions.”

Asked who had arrested Karadžić, Ljajić said that it had been carried out by security service officials, and that this was no secret.

He said that investigations were ongoing to see who had come into contact with Karadžić’s bag and laptop.

“This is not a propaganda headquarters which makes things up to amuse the public or to deceive them. We state to the public what we receive as official information, of course, in the scale and detail that we are able to at that precise moment. Analyses are under way, they are not all complete. In a few days’ time, we will know exactly how many people came into contact with the bag and the items inside it,” the National Council president said.

He said that he would be visiting Brussels in early September to meet with officials of the European Parliament.

“We wish to honestly state everything that has been done and what the current problems are,” Ljajić said, speaking of Serbia’s cooperation with the Tribunal.

He said that it was “realistic that there is no support for what we are doing from the public, but on the other hand, we have a very cold attitude from many EU officials as well.”

Ljajić said that “the majority of the public is against cooperation with the Tribunal, not because people support war criminals, but because the Tribunal is very often unprincipled and because it has delivered very strange verdicts.”