The wanted posters have not created any public outrage in Serbia. Most Serbs are facing dire economic conditions and are sick and tired of having their country isolated because of the failure to capture the accused war criminal Mladic.
"I don't want my children barred from travelling to the E.U. or the U.S.A. because some politicians are secretly protecting a soldier who proved to be maybe brave but also a pathological killer," says Branislava Jovanovic, a graduate of theology working for a Belgrade travel company.
There has even been some public support for capturing Mladic. Rasim Ljajic, president of the National Council for Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, has called on all citizens with any knowledge of his whereabouts to contact the authorities, adding that they would be "doing a favor for the state."
"The gains from Mladic's extradition far outweigh the sums being offered for information leading to his arrest," Ljajic said.
But there are still media that have taken an extreme nationalist line on the campaign to capture Mladic. The populist daily Glas Javnosti has compared the possibility of turning in Mladic to war crime prosecutors to past demands for the extradition of the Serb Royalist resistance leader Draza Mihajlovic to Nazi Germany in 1942.
"This is one of their tricks," says Biljana Kovacevic-Vuco, a prominent human rights lawyer. "They always compare the current Germany of the European Union to Hitler's Germany as if nothing has changed in Berlin since 1945. "
But this move by the Minister of Interior hints that the fate of Ratko Mladic will be sealed in 2009 just as the fate of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader held in the Hague on war crime charges, was sealed in July 2008 when he was arrested.
