SERBIA IS making “maximum efforts” to ensure Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal, is apprehended, the Serbian foreign minister has said during a visit to Dublin.
“We have done everything we could so far,” Vuk Jeremic said, “and we will continue with our maximum efforts in the future to make sure that this chapter of our history is closed.”
In his year-end report to the United Nations Security Council, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz repeated concerns about Serbia’s failure to arrest Mladic and his fellow war crimes fugitive Goran Hadzic.
Mr Jeremic rejected suggestions that political sensitivities had been a factor.
“This is no longer an issue that brings any controversy in Serbia whatsoever, this is not a political issue. This is an issue of it being actually very difficult to find a man who is in hiding.”
A group of Bosnians living in Ireland demonstrated outside the Dáil yesterday as Mr Jeremic appeared before the Oireachtas European affairs committee.
They called on the Government not to ratify the EU’s Stabilisation and Association Agreement, which would pave the way for Serbia’s membership of the EU, until Mladic and Hadzic are arrested.
On Kosovo, Mr Jeremic said Belgrade was ready for dialogue with Pristina.
“The ball is now in Pristina’s court . . . We are very open-minded . . . we are ready to sit down and talk without preconditions and see if we can come up with a solution that can work for everybody.”
A 2009 US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks describes Mr Jeremic and his colleagues in the foreign ministry as appearing “unwilling to fully commit themselves rhetorically or on a policy level to the EU course, and cling to Russia, China and the Non-Alignment Movement as counterweights or alternatives to the EU”.
Mr Jeremic declined to comment on the content of the cable, but said: “When it comes to the priorities of this government, rhetorical and practical, I can only assert that EU membership is the central priority for us.”
Mr Jeremic raised eyebrows last year when he announced that Serbian diplomats would boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honouring Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
Following widespread criticism, Belgrade decided to send its ombudsman to the event. “The Nobel Peace Prize, for us, lost a little bit of credibility two years ago when it was awarded to Martti Ahtisaari, the engineer of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence,” Mr Jeremic said yesterday.
“Serbia’s logic was that if somebody is receiving a Nobel Peace Prize who is an adversary of China, it means that China is not in favour of world peace and that is not Serbia’s view.”