Kosovo Serbs hold pictures of people who went missing or were killed in Kosovo, during a protest rally in front of parliament in Belgrade, Serbia, yesterday.

BELGRADE (AFP) – Serbia’s fruitless hunt for genocide suspect Ratko Mladic will further stall its European integration, said a minister who met yesterday with the United Nations chief war crimes prosecutor.

“We don’t have any trace that leads to Mladic, unless a miracle happens,” said Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister in charge of cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb general, “hid in Serbia up until 2006, that’s evident, (but) we don’t have any information since the first half of 2006,” Ljajic told B92 Television.

“At this moment, there is nobody who can say ‘Mladic is in Serbia’ or ‘Mladic isn’t in Serbia.’” He expressed pessimism about a biannual report war crimes prosecutor Serge Brammertz is to make to the UN Security Council based on two days of talks in Belgrade with senior political and security officials, including Ljajic.

Ljajic said Serbia had given up hope the report could prove it is fully cooperating with his tribunal, a condition for the European Union to unblock a trade and aid agreement with the country, which aspires to join the EU bloc.

But he added that EU member the Netherlands, where the UN court is based, has hardened its stance and now insists exclusively on the arrest and transfer of Mladic.

A Dutch government was forced to resign in 2002 over the perceived inaction of its peacekeepers based in the ill-fated Bosnian town of Srebrenica at the time of Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.

“Even if the report by Serge Brammertz about Serbia’s cooperation with the Hague tribunal is totally positive, the Netherlands will block the application of the agreement,” said Ljajic.

Brammertz’s visit to Belgrade comes just days after Serbian security forces conducted a search for Mladic in a factory in the country’s southwest that turned out to be futile.

Ljajic said the search of the Vujic Valjevo factory one week ago was not merely a show intended to impress the UN prosecutor. “The international community is no longer interested in our efforts, our actions, our exercises, our activity,” the minister said.

“They are interested in concrete results, because we already showed our readiness and political will” by arresting Mladic’s wartime boss, Radovan Karadzic, in the Serbian capital four months ago, he added.