The top UN war crimes prosecutor on Thursday declared that she will not take part in July commemorations to mark the 10th anniversary of Bosnia's Srebrenica massacre unless the two men suspected of responsibility for it have been arrested.
Carla Del Ponte said that her planned no-show was a "personal protest" intending to call on Balkan governments and the international community to do more to capture the two -- Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and his top general, Ratko Mladic.
"In my view, it is impossible for the international community to be present to commemorate Srebrenica if Mladic and Karadzic are not in the Hague," she said.
She added that she would be "very happy and grateful" to participate if the two were in detention at the Netherlands-based tribunal created to try war crimes committed during the 1990s Balkan wars.
Del Ponte claimed Karadzic was hiding in Serbia or Bosnia, while Mladic was in Serbia along with several of 10 other fugitives still sought by the court.
"It is possible to obtain the arrest in time [before the July 11 anniversary], but what we need is pressure," Del Ponte told a news conference.
Srebrenica became the site of Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II when Serb troops in 1995 overran the UN-declared safe zone and slaughtered up to 8,000 mostly Muslim men and boys.
Another high-level suspect, former Yugoslav police chief General Vlastimir Djordjevic, was in Russia, Del Ponte said, while a fugitive who had hidden there -- Dragan Zelenovic -- recently traveled to Cyprus.
In Belgrade, Rasim Ljajic, the head of a Serbia-Montenegro committee in charge of cooperation with the UN tribunal, reacted by saying, "Mladic will be in the Hague by July 11 if he is found in Serbia."
Serb authorities long have claimed that Karadzic has not been hiding on Serb territory, and on Thursday, Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic also denied that Karadzic was in his republic.
"Our security would have spotted and arrested him if he was here. These are only speculations fed to Del Ponte from certain sources," Djukanovic said.
In a speech to the Vienna-based Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Del Ponte said 10 war crimes suspects remained at large because "the relevant authorities are not making sufficient efforts to locate and apprehend them."
"It is mainly a matter of political will to break the networks protecting them and create a favorable climate in the public," she said.
She welcomed signals from Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader that the government would target a network helping another suspect, General Ante Gotovina, elude capture. Gotovina is suspected of responsibility for atrocities carried out against minority Serbs in 1995.
The tribunal has begun referring some cases of lower-level suspects to local courts in an attempt to speed up proceedings. The OSCE agreed Thursday to monitor such local trials, and Del Ponte said its observers would play a crucial role.
"It's extremely important to ensure that the trials that will be conducted in Zagreb or in Belgrade or in Sarajevo are still fair trials with due process," she said.
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