Carla del Ponte left Belgrade Friday possibly for the last time as head prosecutor of the UN war crimes tribunal, aware that she would end her term without getting her hands on the suspect she wanted the most, the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic.
Over the eight years she has been with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), she has relentlessly pressed Serbia for the arrest of Mladic, accused for genocide over crimes such as the slaughter of 8,000 Srebrenica Muslims in 1995.
She would also not try the Bosnian Serb wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic, who has actually published poetry over the past dozen years while NATO-led peacekeepers searched for him in Bosnia.
"Mladic is in Serbia. I'm convinced Karadzic is also in the region, but I don't know if in RS (Republika Srpska, the Serbian part of Bosnia), Serbia or Montenegro," Del Ponte said recently.
Belgrade officials have been as relentless in finding ways not to arrest Mladic, who, it eventually turned out, had military protection until at least 2002, well after the October 2000 fall of his political mentor in Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic.
Now Del Ponte again heard that police and security services were doing their utmost to track down and catch Mladic and two other fugitives believed to be hiding in Serbia, Stojan Zupljanin and Goran Hadzic, even if to no avail.
After meeting Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica and President Boris Tadic, the same old phrases stressing the "firm determination" and "necessity to conclude" cooperation with ICTY were recycled in bland, generic, statements.
The outspoken Del Ponte, who sometimes appeared to enjoy being blunt, this time did not meet reporters.
She did score a consolation point by securing access to the locked ex-Yugoslav archives starting in October, but that bit of business had definitely always been a side issue in her troubled relations with the post-Milosevic Serbia.
Though she again left empty-handed, Serbian leaders appeared unconcerned and are now happily awaiting her departure from office on December 31 - even though she would meanwhile report on the country's progress in relation to ICTY.
Her report was due to help Brussels decide whether to allow Serbia to continue its approach to EU membership, yet local politicians and analysts read signals from the West as an indication that Serbia would be allowed to progress without arresting Mladic.
In 2005, Del Ponte's complaints blocked Serbia's accession talks with the EU for a year.
The next step in EU-Serbia relations would be the initialling of a stabilization and association agreement, presumably within weeks and certainly still in 2007.
For the ratification of the agreement, in a crucial step en route to membership, Serbia would however have to arrest at least one more fugitive suspect, but not necessarily Mladic, an analyst estimated, generally echoing the local perception of the situation.
"I think somebody else from the list will have to be delivered to The Hague ... for the signing of the stabilization and association agreement," the head of the Balkan Institute for Democracy, Ivan Vejvoda, told B92.
In any case, del Ponte would leave the ICTY without trying Mladic and Karadzic and is winding down her tenure after launching a mass of trials of lesser defendants, though among them generals and former presidents.
The greatest catch of hers, Milosevic, the former Serbian and Yugoslav president believed to be the most responsible for causing the Yugoslav wars, was also never sentenced.
He passed away in March 2006, after being on trial longer than four years but still well before the verdict in his mammoth trial was due. dpa bb wjh
