LUKIĆ: GENERAL MLADIĆ WISHED TO BE BURIED NEXT TO HIS DAUGHTER IN BELGRADE

BELGRADE, AUGUST 27 /SRNA/ — The body of General Ratko Mladić, who died today at the detention hospital in The Hague, will be transported to wherever his family decides, and that is where he will be buried, his lawyer Branko Lukić told SRNA, adding that the General's wish was to be buried next to his daughter in Belgrade.

"There are no particular procedures. They have already exhausted all their procedures. We spent so long asking them to send the man home, so that he could die at home. But there was no humanity. We did not expect them to be humane, but with such a level of heartlessness, they surpassed themselves," Lukić said.

He pointed out that doctors in The Hague had stopped treating him, as they had officially stated, and that they were providing him only with palliative care and merely alleviating his pain so that he could die, which, Lukić said, was unacceptable.

He believes that the Hague mechanism should not be given any assistance because they refused to transfer General Mladić for treatment while he was alive. Instead, they should be left to bear all the costs of transporting his body to Serbia themselves, but he added that this could not be done because of the family.

"Of course the Mladić family will want to bring their husband, father and grandfather to Serbia, because you cannot act otherwise when it comes to your own," Lukić said.

He said that Hague doctors would certify the death and that the necessary paperwork would have to be completed, adding that the entire process could take up to seven days.

He added that General Mladić had told him a thousand times that he wanted to be buried next to his daughter Ana at Topčider Cemetery in Belgrade.

"In the conversations we had over the years, he always said that he wanted to find out who had killed his daughter and that, when he died, he wanted to be buried next to her. He told me that countless times," Lukić stated.

Lukić stressed that the problem was that the Hague court has no provision for compensation for damages and cannot be sued, which is why, he said, it acts in this manner.

He said that the Hague Tribunal would remain in the history of international law as a "dead end of international justice” because it had done nothing for international law.

"Their judgments must not be used before other courts. Everything they did was just 'whitewashing for nothing'; they spent money and remained evil to the end. Their mandate expired long ago; I do not know where they got the right to do anything at all," Lukić said.