Serbian PM says will not hunt down Mladic

(23/2/2002)BERLIN (February 23) - Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic has signaled his unwillingness to hunt down Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, saying it could result in civil war, according to an interview published on Saturday. Djindjic said troops from the 50,000-strong NATO peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia and the full resources of the West's intelligence services had failed to secure Mladic's capture. ''Am I now to risk the lives of our police so that Mladic and his 100-strong personal guard can be served up at the table in The Hague? What if it caused civil war to break out? We have over 200,000 refugees from Bosnia, many of them armed. The price is too high,'' Djindjic said in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel. Mladic and former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic have been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for the 1995 mass killing of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys and for the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo, which killed around 12,000 people. Djindjic's advice to both was to hand themselves in. The Serbian premier regretted that the tribunal had provided former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic with a platform to ''play out his demagoguery'' and said he was aghast at the amount of money spent to stage the case. Milosevic is on trial, charged with genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991-92 and Kosovo in 1999. Djindjic also complained about slow and delayed reconstruction payments from the European Union. ''On my desk, I have the latest decision of the European Commission. It's the same scandal. In the past year two-thirds of the promised 300 million euros ($263 million) has been taken away as debts from the Milosevic time... These are cheap tricks,'' he said.

//Shqiptarja.com

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• Ratko Mladiç