Washington, DC: The Advocacy Project (AP) and the Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia & Herzegovina (BAACBH) launched a new e-petition this week calling for the arrest of Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic.

Mr Mladic, the general who oversaw the 1995 Srebrenica massacre that killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men, was indicted for the crime of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and has been on the run for 13 years.

Earlier this year, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was apprehended in Serbia and extradited to The Hague to face trial on charges of genocide and other war crimes.

The new petition is addressed to government officials worldwide and asks that they “use all diplomatic, military, and intelligence resources available to make certain that Mladic is arrested as soon as possible.”

AP has co-sponsored two previous online petitions calling for the arrest of Mr Mladic and Mr Karadzic, in 2005 and 2007. The 2005 petition was co-sponsored by Physicians for Human Rights, the Center for Balkan Development, and the Congress of North American Bosniaks. It attracted 9,976 signatures from people in 90 countries and was handed to the Secretary-General of NATO, who raised the issue with the Serbian foreign minister shortly afterward. The second petition garnered an additional 1,863 signatures calling for the arrests.

Sign the new e-petition.