THOUSANDS OF Serbian ultra-nationalists attacked police in Belgrade last night at a rally where about 10,000 protesters demanded president Boris Tadic and his government resign over Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic’s arrest.
Supporters of the Serbian Radical Party and of similar organisations were bussed in from across the country. Many came straight from soccer matches. Some had banners which read “Srebrenica is a Nato hoax”.
Five protesters and two policemen were seriously injured in the clashes and there were about 70 arrests.
The protests came as the former Bosnian Serb general denied, through his son, responsibility for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. He is charged with responsibility for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre.
“Whatever was done in Srebrenica, he has nothing to do with it. His orders were to evacuate the wounded, the women and the children and then the fighters.
“Whatever was done behind his back, he has nothing to do with that,” said Darko Mladic after he visited his father, who is in detention at Serbia’s war crimes court after 16 years on the run.
Gen Mladic’s family is expected to demand today that a Serbian court orders an independent medical examination to counter Friday’s decision that Mladic is fit to stand trial. Prosecutors have dismissed such moves as a delaying tactic.
Gen Mladic’s lawyer, Milos Saljic, said: “It is impossible to talk to him sensibly about usual things, to talk about his defence case . . . He is really in bad shape psychologically.”
Gen Mladic (69), who has previously suffered at least two minor strokes, said he wanted to visit the grave of his daughter, who died by suicide in 1994. “He says if he can’t go there, he wants his daughter’s coffin brought in here,” Mr Saljic added. “His condition is alarming.”
German judge Christoph Flügge has been appointed presiding judge in the case. He was at the centre of a row two years ago for arguing that “genocide” was an inappropriate term to describe the Srebrenica massacre.
When hearing the case of former Bosnian Serb president, Radovan Karadzic, in The Hague in 2009, he told Der Spiegel magazine that “mass murder” was a more suitable term.
The judge, a former public prosecutor in Berlin, maintained in the interview that there was no reason to differentiate between "a group that is murdered for their nationality, religion, ethnicity or race, as is regulated by the Hague Statute" and a group that "happens to be gathered at a specific location". – (With additional reporting from the Guardianservice and Reuters)
