Belgrade Under Pressure to Deliver General

The Bevanda fish restaurant sits at the end of a residential street in old Belgrade. It was here in late April or early May of 2001 that a startled Belgrade resident realised that one of his fellow diners was Ratko Mladic. He had met the general on several occasions before Mladic became one of the world's most wanted men.

"He was sitting at a table with some others I didn't recognise. All I can tell you is he kept his head down as he ate. I decided it would not be wise to stare," said the man, who does not wish to be identified. With the arrest this week of Radovan Karadzic, the pressure is on Serbia to track down his former army commander and fellow alleged war criminal. It will be no easy task.

In the past eight years, the 66-year-old Mladic has transformed himself from an insolently public fugitive into a phantom. Mladic made his last public appearance at a football international in March 2000. Two years after that, he was seen at a wedding at Valjevo in western Serbia and there were reports subsequently of him using a summer house nearby, at Pricevici. But from then on information about his whereabouts became progressively vaguer and more fanciful. He was on Mount Kosmaj, south of Belgrade. He had fled to Belarus. Or Russia. Or Kazakhstan.

In 2006, however, the part of the Serbian security apparatus that was genuinely searching for Mladic achieved a breakthrough when several people were rounded up and charged with aiding and abetting him, though they have not since been tried. A report in the newspaper Politika yesterday said that those arrests had enabled investigators to pinpoint seven addresses where the general had lived. All were in Belgrade. One was on a hill overlooking the city. Another was in Banjica, significantly, near intelligence headquarters. But all the others were apartments in the vast complex of soulless tower blocks that make up Novi Beograd (New Belgrade). Three were on Yuri Gagarin Street, within a 250-metre radius of the flat where Karadzic was living when arrested.

It is certainly no coincidence that Mladic has proved to be more elusive prey than his political master. Unlike Karadzic, the general remains hero to the majority of Serbs, and can thus count on the passive or active connivance of a huge swath of the population.

Someone who knew him in Bosnia described him as courageous, dauntingly stubborn, virtually humorless - and a very good chess player.

Karadzic, the exhibitionist politician, could not resist inventing a flamboyant new identity as a bearded New Age healer. Mladic, said the source, would have far less difficulty respecting the fugitive's first and golden rule - to remain inconspicuous.

His most vulnerable point is his health. He is known to have been treated for kidney stones before he went on the run. He also suffers from high blood pressure and has suffered at least two minor strokes. Unconfirmed reports of a third stroke in 2006 raised the issue of whether, in fact, he is still alive.