Mladic health assessed for extradition hearing

Serbian war crimes suspect having medical tests before resumption of hearing which is expected to send him to The Hague Doctors in Serbia are assessing the health of genocide suspect Ratko Mladic before he can resume his appearance at an extradition hearing which is expected to transfer him to a war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Europe’s most wanted war crimes suspect was undergoing medical tests in Belgrade to determine the length of sessions he could face, according to media reports. Mladic was said to be “in poor physical state” after his arrest in a north Serbian village 16 years after commanding the worst atrocity on the continent since the Nazi era. His speech was said to be slurred but coherent. Mladic, reported to have suffered strokes in the past and be paralysed in one arm, is expected to face continuous health checks during the extradition process, which is likely to last at least six days. War crimes prosecutors hoped Mladic would appear before the examining judge again on Friday to complete the first stage of the extradition process. This will be followed by a three-day gap and Mladic will have three days after that to decide whether to appeal. The Serbian ministry of justice will then determine the extradition request. Authorities in The Hague expect Mladic to be there next week and will give him a full medical examination. Mladic is waiting on the approval of the Belgrade judge to let his family visit him. His wife, Bosiljka, was seen entering the court building in Belgrade this morning, media reported. The surprise arrest of Mladic, who is wanted for the mass murder of almost 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, turned a page in the history of the Balkans, offering Serbia closure on decades as a virtual international pariah and giving the country a chance to take its place as a pivotal regional democracy eventually anchored in the European Union. The 69-year-old retired general, who commanded the Bosnian Serb military during the 1992-95 war and earned a fearsome reputation as the “butcher of Bosnia”, was taken to a special court pending extradition after being arrested at a cousin’s home in Lazarevo, north-east of Belgrade. When Mladic appeared in court he looked frail and walked slowly. He wore a baseball cap and could be heard on state TV saying “good day” to those present. Mladic’s lawyer said the judge cut short the questioning because the suspect’s “poor physical state” left him unable to communicate. “He is aware he is under arrest, he knows where he is, and he said he does not recognise The Hague tribunal,” Milos Saljic said. The deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric said Mladic was taking a lot of medicine, but “responds very rationally to everything that is going on”. Announcing the arrest of Mladic, President Boris Tadic said: “We have lifted the stain from Serbia and from Serbs wherever they live. We have ended a difficult period in our history.” More details have emerged of the capture of Mladic, who had been living under the alias Milorad Komadic. According to officials in Belgrade and accounts to the Serbian media, Mladic wore no disguise and put up no resistance when detained by the Serbian security services and Serbian war crimes unit. “I am the person you are looking for,” he reportedly said when arrested in part of a cottage once occupied by the now dead parents of his cousin Branko Mladic. He is said to have been dressed in multiple layers of clothing, including pullovers, although it is summer in Serbia. He had his own identity card, although it formally expired in 1999. There were two guns at the property. Asked why Mladic did not resist arrest, his lawyer is reported to have said the officers were “just children”, in other words very young. Reports about his life there differ. One version holds that he spent a lot of time indoors, while one 20-year-old has claimed to a newpaper that he had worked for a time in the nearby industrial town of Zrenjanin. After his arrest, Mladic indicated that he had been following media reports of the war crimes prosecutors’ long pursuit of him. President Tadic, who has been taking the credit for Mladic’s arrest, insisted to CNN that claims his government knew where Mladic was hiding were “rubbish”. “I will reiterate once again that we have worked very hard in order to arrest him and finally managed to do that.” On Thursday night residents took to the streets to show their support for Mladic, singing Serbian nationalist songs. “To us, Mladic is a hero, a military hero,” said one, who would only give his name as Paul. “He protected us from Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina, even Slovenia. He saved our families.” The image of a frail and sickly rural retiree was a far cry from the strutting, imperious commander of the 1990s who was a monstrous figure to the Muslims of Bosnia. His name is synonymous with the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 when Mladic’s forces overran the Bosnian Muslim “safe haven” hill town, then methodically rounded up the males and murdered almost 8,000. The arrest represents a huge boost to Serbia’s attempts to move on from a violent past and to try to catch up with other parts of the Balkans in the race towards integration in the European Union and possibly Nato. • Additional reporting by Kevin Burden in Lazarevo Ratko Mladic Serbia War crimes Bosnia and Herzegovina Europe Peter Beaumont Ian Traynor James Meikle guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 27, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.