The apprehension of Mladic has a key civlisational result, which is when responsibility for war crimes or any crime can be assigned to an individual and proven at trial, thus removing the burden off the shoulders of people that unfairly suffer because some of its members have perpetrated crimes, said Uzelac, the highest ranking ethnic Serb official in the Croatian government.
Uzelac said this on Friday in Dugopolje near Split, where he was attending a panel discussion on human rights and Croatia's European Union prospects.
Innocent people should not suffer the consequences of crimes which members of their people have committed, he said, commending Serbia's political leadership for mustering the strength to capture Mladic, who had been on the run for 16 years.
Asked to comment on announcements that the prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) would ask for expanding the Mladic indictment to include war crimes in Croatia, Uzelac said that the entire job would probably be lacking without that.
The Mladic capture was on Friday welcomed by a few nongovernmental organisations, including the GOLJP, Documenta and the Osijek-based peace centre, human rights watchdogs.