Christian Jennings: Serbia may be out in the cold until Mladic is arrested

Both images are years old, of course, because the man in them has not officially been seen in public for well over a decade.

This despite the offer, printedon the poster, of a €1 million (824,000) reward for information leading to his arrest.

The man is Ratko Mladic, ex-chief of staff of the Bosnian Serb army, indicted for genocide and a variety of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war by the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1996. He's been on the run since then and along with Osama bin Laden is one of the most wanted men on earth.

UN court officials believe Mladic is hiding in Serbia, where nationalist hard-liners consider him a war hero. According to Serbian officials, Mladic's whereabouts have been last tracked to 2005.

Police have searched his family home in Belgrade on several occasions, confiscating documents - including his war diaries - that have been handed over to the UN prosecutors

The Serbian government claims ignorance of his whereabouts, although its tenacious chief war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said this month that he would "smoke Mladic out of his hole".

Whether Foreign Minister William Hague, visiting Belgrade this week for talks with the Serbian government on Kosovo and EU affairs, saw the poster of Ratko Mladic at the airport is one thing: whether he intends to take concrete action on it is another.

Serbia signed an EU Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) and an Interim Agreement on Trade and Trade-Related issues in April 2008, and once the European Council of Foreign Ministers, via member parliaments, decides that Serbia is fully co-operating with the ICTY, both deals can be ratified.

Serbia was given the EU pre-accession green light on 14 June this year, when the 27 EU foreign ministers decided to submit the country's SAA to the parliaments of EU member states for ratification.

Spain, Malta, Bulgaria and Italy have so far ratified the document. The UK is expected to decide on it early this autumn.

Serbia has a large trade deficit with the EU: in 2007, its exports to the EU amounted to €3.6 billion and its imports from the EU to €7.4bn. Net foreign direct investment from EU countries in Serbia in 2007 was about €2.3bn

But what is vastly more important, say a legion of regional analysts, war crimes investigators, international politicians and, all too sadly, the relatives of Mladic's thousands of victims, is that Mladic is arrested and transferred to The Hague before Serbia reaps any benefits of EU trade deals and accession.The question is pretty simple: is it acceptable that Mladic is still at large in Europe in 2010, hiding in plain sight - the equivalent of Himmler or Eichmann living somewhere in Berlin in 1960 - with the authorities turning a blind eye to his presence? Is it more important that he is arrested than Serbia has, say, a good deal on its raspberry and sugar exports? Mladic's transfer to The Hague is a key condition for Serbia's accession to the EU, and all member states have to ratify the bloc's SAA before the country can join.

If the EU is to be taken seriously as an effective player in the western Balkans, it is crucial that it holds firm on Serbia and Mladic, and that member states do too.

"The Croatians were forced to hand over their alleged war criminal General Ante Gotovina before that country could start EU accession talks," says Denis MacShane MP, the former Labour minister for Europe.

"The Serbs should be required to do no less with Mladic."

Kurt Bassuener, a regional political analyst, says: "The questions HM government and all MPs need to ask themselves are: does ratification of Serbia's SAA serve the cause of justice? Does it assist in the durable democratic transformation of Serbia? And does it strengthen or weaken the EU's leverage and credibility in Serbia and the western Balkans more generally?

"I think the answer to all these questions is a solid no."