Serbia must arrest Mladic before EU talks - Dutch

ZAGREB (Reuters) - The Netherlands will not agree to unfreeze an agreement on closer ties between Serbia and the European Union until Belgrade arrests genocide suspect Ratko Mladic, Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen said on Tuesday.

"I would like to underscore that the Euroatlantic perspective also for Serbia is of utmost importance... So therefore if they arrest Mladic and they deliver, then we will deliver," Verhagen told reporters during a visit to Croatia, which is negotiating for EU membership.

The United Nations war crimes tribunal indicted the 66-year-old former Bosnian Serb military commander for genocide over his role in the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men in the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.

Serbia arrested Mladic's ally, former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, in July and hoped this would help boost its prospects of eventually joining the 27-nation bloc.

It signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU in April in the first step towards ultimate membership, but the Dutch blocked implementation of that agreement, insisting that Mladic must first be captured and sent to The Hague.

Other EU member states are keen to extend the trade and cooperation benefits of the interim agreement to reward the pro-European government in Belgrade, and had hoped the Dutch would relent at next week's EU foreign ministers' meeting.

But another Dutch official said: "The SAA cannot be implemented or put forward for ratification as long as there is no full cooperation from Serbia, and best example would be the arrest and extradition of Mr Mladic.

"If he is extradited, the Dutch will keep their promise," the official said.

The issue is particularly sensitive in the Netherlands because Dutch U.N. peacekeepers were guarding Srebrenica when Bosnian Serb forces overran it in 1995, and The Hague is the seat of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

(Reporting by Zoran Radosavljevic, Editing by Paul Taylor)