The indictment against former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic is strong and the prosecution will do its best to speed up his forthcoming trial as much as possible, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Serge Brammertz, said in an interview with the Bosnian Dnevni Avaz daily of Tuesday.
Brammertz said that over the last 17 years the ICTY's prosecution had learned a lot about criminal prosecution in big and complex war crimes cases, which he said would be useful in Mladic's trial.
We have organised the indictment and adjusted it to the indictment against Radovan Karadzic, said Brammertz, explaining that the indictment would focus on ethnic cleansing, terrorising of civilians in Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica and the taking of UN peacekeepers hostage.
Brammertz said it would be best in Mladic's case if he was defended by an attorney, rather than defending himself on his own, which was what Karadzic was doing.
Brammertz expressed satisfaction that Mladic was finally arrested, but wondered how he could have been hiding for so many years.
We have information on where Mladic was hiding until 2006, but not on his whereabouts from that year until his arrest, the ICTY's chief prosecutor said, adding that he still expected Serbian authorities to arrest Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic, as well as Radovan Stankovic, who escaped to Serbia from a prison in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he was serving a long prison sentence for war crimes.
