Serbia braces for Mladic extradition protests

[pampango]

Source: Aljazeera

Security stepped up in Belgrade as right-wing groups urge supporters, mostly soccer hooligans, to join Sunday's rally.

Serb authorities have tightened security ahead of protests by supporters of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general awaiting extradition to the Hague to face war crimes charges.

Extreme right-wing groups urged their supporters, mostly soccer hooligans, to join Sunday's planned rally in front of parliament in downtown Belgrade, the capital. The rally, organised organised by the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, is seen as a test about whether Mladic still enjoys popular support after 16 years as a fugitive.

Additional attention has been focused on the extremist groups these days," said Ivica Dacic, Serbia's police chief. "We are taking measures to prevent the escalation of extremist behavior."

Mladic's lawyer, Milos Saljic, said the former Bosnian Serb military commander knows he will be extradited to a UN war crimes tribunal but wants time to rest before the trip. Saljic told reporters that Mladic does not know exactly when he will be extradited to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, "but he would like to recover a little bit first".


Police said their attention is on extremist groups they fear may cause trouble

Read more: http://english.aljazeera.net//news/europe/2011/05/201152972043808605.html

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The Serbian Radical Party (SRS) is a radical nationalist political party in Serbia, founded in 1991.

Ideology

The party's core ideology is based on Serbian nationalism, and it subscribes to the idea of Greater Serbia which, according to Šešelj, is the raison d'être of the party. The party also describes itself as anti-globalist, and wants to abandon Serbian attempts to become a member of the European Union. Instead, it aims to establish pan-Slavic "brotherly" ties with Russia, as well as ties with China, and to unite all Balkan Serbs into a single country. In 2007 it advocated the use of force to block the independence of Kosovo. The party remains loyal to the legacy of late President Milošević, and would bring an end to searches for fugitives wanted by the ICTY such as Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić; the party regards both to be "Serbian heroes".

International relations

The SRS has maintained ties with Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, as well as France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and his National Front. The party formerly counted Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party as one of its political and financial backers, as the parties found common cause in defiance of the United States. Similar sentiment led the party to back Libya's Muammar Gaddafi following the 2011 military intervention in Libya by NATO. Serbia and Libya had maintained good relations since Gaddafi vocally opposed NATO intervention in Serbia in the 1990s, while he also backed Serbia's opposition to Kosovo's independence.

[iemitsu]

1. interesting that the right wing and the "soccer hooligans"

are identified as one and the same in serbia.

[pampango]

2. LA Times: Ultranationalist Serbs protest Mladic's arrest

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-serbia-mladic-protest-20110530,0,810599.story


Members of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party clash with riot police
during a protest against the arrest of Ratko Mladic in Belgrade.

Thousands rally in Belgrade against the arrest of war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic, saying he is being unfairly singled out. Mladic's son denies his father ordered the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war.

Thousands of supporters of war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic rallied Sunday to protest the arrest of the man whom they revere as a national hero but whom much of the West considers a mass murderer.

Ultranationalists, government foes and rowdy soccer fans gathered in front of the parliament building in downtown Belgrade to wave Serbian flags and denounce Mladic's capture and expected extradition this week to The Hague to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. If the two-hour rally was a mostly peaceful affair, it was also far smaller than organizers had hoped. The turnout was only a fraction of the size of the angry crowds that filled the streets when Mladic's onetime boss, former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, was arrested and extradited three years ago.

The protesters condemned President Boris Tadic as a toady of the West and denied allegations that Mladic, as the Bosnian Serb military commander, ordered the killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995. The atrocity was the worst in Europe since World War II and has come to symbolize the brutality of the ethnic cleansing campaigns seen in the 1992-95 Balkan war.

The senior Mladic's arrest, 16 years after his indictment by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, has been a key demand by Western governments and a precondition for Serbia's bid to join the European Union, which Tadic's pro-Western government has ardently pursued. Many Serbs believe EU membership will improve their living standards and signal their country's rehabilitation on the world stage. Winning EU candidate status for Serbia this fall will be crucial for Tadic's party in general elections next year, proof that handing over Mladic was worth it, said Ljiljana Smajlovic, president of the Assn. of Journalists of Serbia.