Serbian war criminal's urban odyssey

Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, wanted for the most heinous crimes of Bosnia's civil war, has eluded capture for 11 years. Now details have emerged of his network of Belgrade hiding places. By Nicholas Wood

After 11 years, the hunt for Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic may well be the most frustrating, infuriating and fruitless around. The two, wanted for the most heinous crimes of Bosnia's bloody civil war from 1992 to 1995, have managed to elude thousands of Western peacekeepers and local police forces with what is widely suspected to be the collusion of the Serbian military. Reality and myth have grown indistinguishable as stories have emerged of their possible hiding places and of the failed attempts to track them down.

Now, for the first time, clear – even mundane – details of how Mladic has managed to dodge arrest are emerging bit by bit in a Belgrade courtroom.
Until January 2006 the general, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb army, was living in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, protected by a network of former comrades in arms, according to testimony given during the trial of 11 people accused of helping to hide him.

Evidence at the trial describes an urban odyssey that started out with the general hiding in Belgrade's best-known army barracks with the full knowledge of the army hierarchy, and then shows him being whisked away in a Yugo by bodyguards to a private apartment.

For a period of three-and-a-half years, the one-time Yugoslav army officer, who is still regarded as a hero by many Serbs but is vehemently despised by the Bosnian Muslims he victimised, moved among six addresses. He used some for a matter of days and others for months, before finally hiding out in a communist-era monolith for more than two years. There, prosecutors say, he was provided with a housekeeper, and groceries and phone cards were brought to his door.

Throughout, he seemed to have the protection of the army and state officials. At one point he was offered plastic surgery and a false passport to help him flee the country, something he appears to have declined. To this day he still eludes arrest.

Mladic and Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, were indicted at the end of the Bosnian war by an international war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for laying siege to Sarajevo and masterminding the massacre in 1995 in Srebrenica of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The trial of the 11 began in September, after intense international pressure on the Serbian government to prove it was trying to find Mladic. Among the accused are the former leader of the general's personal bodyguards as well as the head of Bosnian Serb military security during the war. Others in the dock include the owners of apartments that prosecutors say he used and a former Yugoslav army helicopter pilot who acted as a chauffeur.

War crimes investigators familiar with the case say it stops short of indicting the people who could lead to his capture and leaves unresolved many questions about the government's involvement. No charges have been brought against the senior army officers or other government officials implicated by witnesses.

The Serbian justice ministry and state prosecutors have declined requests to be interviewed.

The case dates from May 2002, when prosecutors say Mladic was being hidden in the Topcider Barracks in the heart of the exclusive Dedinje' district, close to the former home of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president and one-time ally of the Bosnian Serb leadership. According to Srboljub Nikolic, a former lieutenant colonel in charge of security at the barracks, Mladic hid there in the complex until May 2002 with the full approval of Yugoslavia's foremost military body, the Supreme Defense Council, which included Vojislav Kostunica, then president of Yugoslavia and now prime minister of Serbia.

In May 2002, the Yugoslav government signed an agreement of cooperation with the Hague tribunal and the army decided Mladic could no longer stay in the barracks, according to the prosecutors' case and the testimony.

Rather than ensure his arrest as required by a recent court order, the army took steps to see that he was looked after by his own private security detail, the testimony indicated. Mladic's former head of military security, Marco Lugunja, and Jovan Djogo, the bodyguard, admitted helping him but insisted that doing so was not illegal.
Lugunja said he put the general up in his apartment for four or five days. Djogo testified that he rented apartment number 20 at 118 Yuri Gagarin Street for €400 a month, high rent for the area.

The image of a man being ferried across Belgrade's less-than-glamorous neighbourhoods in the most ordinary of cars contrasts with that of the swaggering general that Serbs grew to know during the Bosnian war.

The building at 118 Yuri Gagarin lies in one of Belgrade's most infamously drab housing complexes, where a series of identical concrete towers stretch for over a kilometer. During almost three years of use, until January 2006, prosecutors say the general came and went as he pleased. All the while, there is no record of anyone seeing him.

In the apartment across the poorly-lit corridor from number 20, Miroslava Kovacevic, a retired factory clerk, described seeing a middle-aged couple come and go infrequently, but said she never spoke more than a few words to them. Most residents, she said, paid little attention to one another. Another neighbour, Fahira Redzic, an elderly Bosnian Muslim, also recalled little of the resident at number 20. “We didn't know him,” Redzic said.

One Serbian analyst suggested that the lack of sightings reflected a lack of interest in the general's fate, partly because he represented an era many Serbs would prefer to forget and possibly because he was still supported by high-level officials.

“I don't think anybody would call the police if they saw him,” said Dejan Anastasijevic, a security analyst with the weekly magazine Vreme. “Nobody is sure who is still behind him in the government. In that situation, the best thing is to do
nothing.”

“If anyone called the police, I'm not sure they would come,” he added.

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