Serbia’s Next Tourist Attraction? Sightings of War Crimes Suspects
BalkanTravellers.com
The JUGpress information agency reported today that it received photographs, allegedly capturing Ratko Mladić, by an anonymous reader. According to the Serbian B92 radio, it is likely that the photographs are of somebody else who resembles the indicted war criminal.
According to its reports, the images have been checked by the appropriate organs who found that the person in the photographs is Aleksandar Isailović, who looks a lot like Mladić. Isailović was arrested on September 5 on suspicions that he was in fact Mladić, but was quickly released after the police found out its mistake, the radio station reported.
Mladić served as the Chief of Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb Army, during the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. He was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995 and accused of genocide, crimes against humanity, and numerous war crimes, including the alleged sniping campaign against civilians in Sarajevo and the attack on the United Nations-declared safe area of Srebrenica in 1995.
The reports of Ratko Mladić’s roaming around Serbia could prove to be the country’s latest attraction for tourists, who have already shown a taste for visiting the traces left by the wars that shook the region in the 1990s and retracing the steps of indicted war crimes suspects, as BalkanTravellers.com reported in October.
Most organised tours of Belgrade have included since 2000 a visit to a downtown army headquarters bombed by NATO in 1999. This summer, just days after Radovan Karadžić, the war-crimes-indicted Bosnian Serbs’ leader, was captured after 13 years on the run, a tour agency in the Serbian capital began offering tours that traced Karadžić’s footsteps around the city. As BalkanTravellers.com reported in July, the tour included his favourite haunts while he was posing as a white-bearded alternative healer, as well as his place of capture.
As a demonstration of Belgrade’s determination to meet its remaining commitments to the Hague, the Serbian government announced in October of 2007 that 1 million euro would be rewarded for information leading to Mladić's capture and arrest.
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