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US army 'had opportunities to grab Mladic' Fugitive general was shadowed for five months after Serbian conflict ended, claims historian * <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/peterbeaumont> Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor * <http://observer.guardian.co.uk> The Observer, Sunday 8 March 2009 * Article history <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/08/ratko-mladic-tracked#history-by line> For fifteen years he has been Europe's most wanted man - the Bosnian Serb General Ratko <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ratko-mladic> 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 rumours of negotiations with the European Union 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 Austrian, Swedish, and Ukrainian 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 defence 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 that has been described as "crap" by Holbrooke. The extraordinary 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. According to Ingrao, 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 told the Observer 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 the general was largely confined to his command bunker and the command headquarters of the 65th regiment, a Serb formation near Mount Zep. "We were told there were meetings too which the source participated in with Mladic, sometimes for up to 30 minutes," said Ingrao. "He said it was 'understood' by the US chain of command that these meetings were taking place." Among those who attended, says Ingrao, was a US colonel who attempted to negotiate Mladic's surrender, despite the fact that an international arrest warrant compelled US forces to seize him. 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". In another interview with the BalkanInsight last week, Ingrao added that the US prohibition on capturing suspects "was so proscriptive that not a single one of more that 50 indictees was apprehended by IFOR during the first 18 months of its deployment in Bosnia". According to sources at the Hague, Mladic's whereabouts since around 2000 are unknown.
