Serbian Minister of the Interior Ivica Dacic on Wednesday called on the two remaining fugitives from the Hague war crimes tribunal, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, to turn themselves in.
In a statement carried by the media in Belgrade, Dacic called on Mladic and Hadzic to surrender because they were holding Serbia hostage and harming its national interests.
The minister expressed hope that during his next visit to Belgrade, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, would see for himself that Serbia's cooperation with the tribunal was most constructive.
The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said on Monday that failure to arrest Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb army commander, would be the worst possible signal to the international judiciary.
More should be done, Brammertz said, adding that representatives of his office met with Serbian officials every two weeks to discuss the state of the investigation in that case.
Mladic is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb troops killed around 8,000 Muslim men in 1995.
Hadzic, a former leader of Croatian Serb rebels in eastern Slavonia, is charged with crimes against Croats and other non-Serbs committed between mid 1991 and late 1993 in areas held by the rebel forces.
