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Commander of worst crimes in Europe since Nazis is expected to face genocide trial in The Hague after years of impunity Europe’s most wanted war crimes suspect, General Ratko Mladic, was arrested in a north Serbian village 16 years after commanding the worst atrocity on the continent since the Nazi era. The surprise arrest of the genocide suspect, wanted for the mass murder of almost 8,000 men in Srebenica, 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. Mladic faces 15 charges of war crimes. “We have lifted the stain from Serbia and from Serbs wherever they live,” said President Boris Tadic, announcing the arrest of the longtime fugitive who had been living in a cousin’s cottage in a village north-east of Belgrade under the alias Milorad Komadic. “We have ended a difficult period in our history,” Tadic added. 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 in Belgrade pending extradition to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Mladic appeared in court on Thursday night, looking frail and walking slowly. He wore a baseball cap and could be heard on state TV saying “good day” to those present. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader arrested three years ago, is on trial in The Hague on similar charges to Mladic. To speed the proceedings, there will be attempts to merge the two trials into one, sources in The Hague said. In a message from his cell on the Dutch coast, Karadzic said he was “very sorry” for Mladic’s “loss of freedom”. 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 service in the village of Lazarevo in a cottage belonging to a cousin, also bearing the name Mladic. The general was said to have aged, to have suffered a stroke, and to be paralysed in one arm. “I am Ratko Mladic,” he reportedly said when arrested. Local people 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,” he said. 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 and whose 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. Mladic will be allowed to appeal against extradition, Belgrade prosecutors said, meaning it could be at least a week before he is flown to the Netherlands. The Serbian government is under strong international pressure to get Mladic to The Hague. Tadic said preparations were under way to send Mladic to The Netherlands. “Mladic will face the charges against him in the international tribunal,” said Lady Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief. Serge Brammertz, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, said: “We await arrangements for his transfer to The Hague where he will stand trial.” Barack Obama, in France for the G8 summit, said Mladic must answer to his victims and the world in a court of law. 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 EU and possibly Nato. European leaders united in praising Serbia’s sudden move, talking up the prospects of opening negotiations with Belgrade later this year on joining the EU. The arrest came as a coda to the experiment in international justice that has been the Hague tribunal for almost 20 years. Only one of 161 people charged with war crimes remains at large – Goran Hadzic, a wartime leader of the Croatian Serbs. The continued liberty of Mladic, the most notorious of the Balkan warlords of the 90s, has been the biggest block on Serbia’s international ambitions for years. Following the arrest and extradition in 2008 of Karadzic, as well as the transfer of the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague in 2001, Belgrade is confident it is now washing away the stigma of war crimes. The Srebrenica massacre was the worst atrocity in Europe for decades and the only event in Bosnia that the tribunal has judged to have been an act of genocide in a war that left 100,000 dead, two thirds of them Bosnian Muslims. Mladic also faces charges of orchestrating a campaign of terror against the civilian population of Sarajevo, the city his forces kept under siege for more than three years during which 10,000 were killed, of taking UN peacekeepers hostage, and of “the murders, persecution, forcible transfer, detention and mistreatment of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats during the campaign to permanently remove such persons from the territory under the control of [his] forces”. Munira Subasic, who heads the association of Bosnian women who lost sons, fathers and husbands at Srebrenica, said: “I’m sorry for all the victims who are dead and cannot see this day.” When Mladic was indicted by the tribunal in 1995, the judge described the alleged crimes as “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. The evidence collected by the prosecution, said Judge Fouad Riad, pointed to deeds of “unimaginable savagery – thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson”. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato secretary general, said: “Mladic played a key role in some of the darkest episodes of Balkan and European history.” Additional reporting by Kevin Burden in Lazarevo. Ratko Mladic Radovan Karadzic Serbia Europe Bosnia and Herzegovina War crimes European Union Ian Traynor guardian.co.uk