Serbia Denies Claims That Mladic Was Treated for Cancer

Serbian State Secretary in the Justice Ministry, Slobodan Homen called the claims that Mladic was ill with cancer and treated in Serbian hospitals “complete nonsense”.

Homen told Balkan Insight that he had seen the document which Mladic’s lawyer claims shows that his client was treated for lymph node cancer in 2009. Dismissing the document as a “forgery”, he explained that parts of it were blacked out and called the claims “part of an ugly campaign against the Serbian government”.

Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic had been on the run for more than 15 years when he was arrested in Serbia on May 26. He was transferred on Tuesday evening to the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague, where he will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Milos Saljic, Mladic’s lawyer in Belgrade, told Balkan Insight that the reports that his client was treated for cancer were accurate.

Saljic has released a photocopy of a document that he says shows that the war crimes indictee has been battling lymph node cancer and underwent surgery and received chemotherapy for it in 2009.

Saljic said the document was a doctor’s diagnosis of Mladic’s condition, which indicated that Mladic was in a Serbian hospital from April 20 and July 18, 2009.

The photocopy lists personal data about the patient, and includes a field for rank, which is filled in with “general”. Because of this information, local media have assumed that this indicates that the document, if it is authentic, was issued by the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade, VMA.

The chief prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Serge Brammertz, told Balkan Insight this was the first he had heard about Mladic’s alleged cancer, explaining that he believed the claims are just speculation. He added that the Hague knew nothing about Mladic’s condition over the past five years.

Serbian Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac on Thursday denied that Mladic had been treated at the Military Medical Academy in 2009.

“The Serbian army and our security services have been in charge of the VMA for several years so it’s impossible to get in unnoticed,” the defence minister said.

He added, however, that an investigation will be conducted to prove that the VMA has not treated a single war crimes suspect.

“I do not know why the lawyer of Ratko Mladic is manipulating the public this way. He discredits the entire health system, including the military,” Sutanovac told reporters in Svilajnac.