President Tadic with the U.S. State Secretary Powell

By David R. Sands

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Serbia's new reformist president said yesterday his election has broken a political stalemate that had blocked the capture of indicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, removing a key hurdle to better relations with the United States and European Union.
    

President Boris Tadic also said U.S. engagement with Serbia and the Balkans is critical in the days ahead, both for dealing with the unresolved issue of Kosovo and for rebuilding Serbia's economy.
    

"I really think our victory in the elections last month can be the start of a new era in our bilateral relationship," said Mr. Tadic, 45, who was a close ally of assassinated Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic and who defeated a nationalist rival in the runoff vote on June 27.
    

The fate of Mr. Mladic, a Bosnian Serb military commander suspected of hiding in Serbia, and other fugitives sought by an international tribunal in The Hague remains a key sticking point in relations with the West.
    

Mr. Mladic, in hiding for eight years, is wanted on charges for his role in the Bosnian Serb campaigns against Muslims during the Balkan ethnic wars of the 1990s.
    

Serbian authorities turned over former President Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague court in 2001, but the Bush administration and congressional critics have pressed successive Serbian governments to turn over more indicted figures, by tying aid and economic assistance to the issue.
    

Mr. Tadic told a National Press Club press conference yesterday that full cooperation with the Hague tribunal "is in our national interest."
    

"My victory has cemented the political consensus necessary to locate [Mr. Mladic] and other fugitives from justice," he said. "If Mladic is in Serbia, we will capture him."
   

Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, the State Department's point man on the war-crimes issue, met with Mr. Tadic on Monday and suggested that Washington was ready to permit other Hague fugitives to be tried inside Serbia if Mr. Mladic is surrendered to the international court.
    

"The key to this is Ratko Mladic," Mr. Prosper said.
    

Mr. Tadic, after his press club remarks, said relations with the United States have undergone a sea change. On his first foreign trip since his election, the Serbian president met with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
    

Mr. Tadic said he also had "very useful and warm discussions" with congressional leaders this week.
    

"Serbia could not have a better ambassador in this town than this guy," said Damjan de Krnjevic-Miskovic, managing editor of the National Interest, a quarterly journal of foreign affairs.
    

Mr. Tadic said he received an encouraging response from U.S. officials to a plan that Belgrade is offering for political reform in Kosovo, but said Serbia will continue to insist on punishment for Kosovar Albanians suspected of planning violent attacks on the province's Serbs in March.
    

The Serbian president also said he would seek no change in Serbia's tough line against eventual independence for Kosovo, a goal overwhelmingly supported by the region's Albanian majority. 

"From my point of view, as president of Serbia, the independence of Kosovo is simply unacceptable," he said.