BELGRADE, Serbia, April 19 (UPI) -- Serbian authorities can't arrest two key war crimes suspects wanted by an international court, because the risk of political unrest is too great, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said in a German newspaper interview published Friday.
The prime minister's comments came one day after Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, visited the country to ask why former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, had not been arrested.
The two were indicted by the tribunal for crimes against humanity and genocide allegedly committed in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. Del Ponte claims that at least Mladic lives in Serbia under Yugoslav Army protection. Serbia's police minister said Friday that neither Mladic nor Karadzic was in Serbia.
The country's federal parliament passed a recent law to cooperate with the international tribunal by turning over suspected war criminals. Del Ponte recently sent the government a list of 23 indictees she expects to be transferred to the tribunal.
A three-day deadline for suspects to voluntarily turn themselves in expires at midnight Saturday. The government will start arresting indictees once the deadline passes, Djindjic said.
Not only could there be political unrest if the war crimes suspects are arrested, Djindjic said, his country's police forces are too weak and too poorly armed to do the job. If 50,000 NATO-led peacekeepers in Bosnia-Herzegovina have failed to catch Karadzic and Mladic in the past five years, how can Serbia's 20,000-strong police force do so, Djindjic asked, rhetorically.
Djindjic did not say why there might be political unrest.
But in recent days, nationalists have put up posters with pictures of Karadzic and the caption "Every Serb is Radovan" in towns around Serbia.
Political activists in the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina have countered with stickers reading "Not all Serbs are criminals" pasted across the Karadzic pictures.
Former President Slobodan Milosevic whipped up nationalist fervor in the late 1980s, which Karadzic and Mladic spearheaded in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Under their command, the Bosnian Serb army pushed Croats and the majority Muslim population out of two-thirds of Bosnia. The men received apparent national hero status during the campaign.
