For 15 years he has been Europe’s most wanted man — the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic — alleged architect of the deaths of up to 7,500 men and boys at Srebrenica, and commander of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
Now, amid rumors of negotiations with the EU over his possible arrest, it has been alleged that for five months after the end of the war a US Army unit tracked Mladic and conducted meetings with the fugitive general, but declined to arrest him for fear of triggering violence that might result in US casualties.
The allegations — if proved — would rewrite the story of how so many Bosnian Serb indictees before The Hague managed to slip through the net despite the presence of so many US and other troops. It is claimed that for 18 months after the war, indictees including Karadzic were able to commute between home and office in full view of the International Police Task Force, whose officers failed to report these sightings
It has emerged at an especially sensitive time as Mladic’s colleague, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, has begun his trial at The Hague claiming in his defense that he had signed a secret deal with US envoy Richard Holbrooke that he would not be prosecuted if he withdrew from politics — a claim denied by Holbrooke.
The new claims have been made by US historian Charles Ingrao of Purdue University, the director of the Scholars’ Initiative, a collaborative research project into the history of the Yugoslav conflicts. While supporters of the former Bosnian Serb leadership have periodically made claims regarding secret deals in the immediate aftermath of the war, the latest allegation is unusual, coming as it does from a group that has dedicated itself to exploding myths around the conflict.
Ingrao says his group was approached two years ago by a former US serviceman who was a member of the unit set up to track Mladic following the Dayton and Paris agreements that ended the three-and-a-half year long war at the end of 1995.
By then Mladic had been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity.
“We were approached two years ago by a member of the unit,” Ingrao said last week. “It was a team set up by IFOR [the International Force] to follow Mladic around. The source was a member of this team who subsequently went on to do an intelligence job, which gave what he said added credibility.”
During the time that the US unit was tracking Mladic he was largely confined to his command bunker and the command headquarters of the 65th regiment.
“We were told there were meetings too which the source participated in with Mladic, sometimes for up to 30 minutes,” Ingrao said. “He said it was ‘understood’ by the US chain of command that these meetings were taking place.”
Ingrao says that the information has been confirmed to the Scholars’ Initiative by four different sources in the US diplomatic service, who all claimed they were ordered “not to arrest Mladic.”
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