Bosnia Serb PM urges war crimes suspects to surrender
Source: Reuters
By Olja Stanic BANJA LUKA, Bosnia, Dec 9 (Reuters) - The prime minister of Bosnia's Serb Republic called on Saturday on all war crimes fugitives to surrender for the good of their compatriots. "I call ... on the indictees to surrender and enable us to continue with a full democratic development of the Republika Srpska so that we are relieved of a burden that can always stop us in our progress," Milorad Dodik told a news conference. International envoys in Brussels this week criticised Bosnia and particularly the Serb Republic for not doing enough to apprehend Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, fugitives from the Bosnian 1992-95 war. Bosnian Serb wartime leader Karadzic and Stojan Zupljanin are two of the six remaining fugitives from the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia who are sought by the U.N. war crimes tribunal and believed to be hiding in the region. U.N. Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte last week said the two men were hiding in the border zone between the Serb Republic and Serbia. "I am ready to personally head a unit tasked to arrest the persons indicted for war crimes, if I knew where they were," Dodik said. "When Republika Srpska completes the issue of war crimes indictees, its role, importance and perception by the world will significantly change. That is why we need to be done with it." Dodik repeated that the Serb police should be preserved under the EU-sponsored police reform, which envisages its unification with the police of the Muslim-Croat federation, the country's other half, to make it more functional and cheaper. "We don't see the reason why the RS police, in charge of the Republika Srpska territory, cannot be kept," he said. The reform that would turn Bosnia's two ethnically-based police forces into a state-run institution operating across the country is a key condition for Bosnia to sign the first agreement towards integration with the European Union. The Peace Implementation Council (PIC) for Bosnia, gathering world major countries and agencies, said this week the Stabilisation and Association Agreement would not be signed without agreed police reform. "Anyone reneging on previous commitments and not cooperating on this important reform must be ready to accept the consequences," PIC said in a statement.
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