IF SERBIAN authorities had really wanted to catch Ratko Mladic over the past decade a smart place to start would have been a well-kept grave site in Belgrade’s Topcider cemetery.

While police and intelligence services have supposedly been scouring the nation for the man who masterminded the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, General Mladic has regularly been spotted visiting the grave of his daughter Ana.

Last Friday, as 10,000 Mladic supporters from the nationalist Radical Party gathered a few miles away in main square in Belgrade to protest against international demands that the former Bosnian Serb general must finally be handed over, Ana’s grave was once again unmonitored.

A few people wrapped in heavy jackets quietly cleaned other graves dotted around the cemetery, which is spread over a wooded hillside in the city’s south-east suburbs, but nobody paid any attention to Ana’s resting place or the wooden bench installed beside it.

A chilly wind had sprinkled pine needles over the grave. Somebody had recently placed two fresh bouquets of purple flowers on its grey granite, which bears a simple inscription in Cyrillic script: the family name and then “Ana 1971-1994.” The death of Ana, a beautiful medical student, from a single gunshot to the head left her doting father deeply depressed and the Serbian public intrigued by her apparent suicide and its impact on General Mladic.

Munira Subasic, a Muslim widow from Srebrenica, has had more cause than most to wonder about General Mladic’s behaviour after Ana’s death.

“There have been thousands of nights when I have laid in my bed unable to sleep, asking myself how he could lose his daughter like that and then inflict the same pain on other parents,” she said in an interview in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

“This was a human being who had felt the pain that only a parent can, and then he killed so many other children, destroyed so many other parents . . . Losing his daughter should have sent him on the right path. Instead it sent him twice as far on the wrong path — perhaps it somehow made him more brutal and unable to care about other people’s pain.”

Ms Subasic, talking in an office run by a support group of Srebrenica widows, was speaking from terrible experience. On July 12, 1995, she tearfully pleaded face to face with Mladic in Potocari, a village outside Srebrenica, to save the life of her son Nermin, 19.

General Mladic had just led his men into the “safe haven” which was supposedly protected by Dutch peacekeepers, and addressed a terrified crowd in front of Serbian television cameras. Standing in an open car park, General Mladic assured the thousands of families who had been herded together that they would be safe, even as his ethnic Serbian troops began the ominous process of separating males aged 12 to 70 from their women and children.

“There was already the smell of blood in the air, and when Mladic stopped talking and the cameras went off I pushed forward and begged him to spare Nermin because he was ill. He looked me in the eyes, asked my son’s name and said he would be safe. Then he cheated me.”

Ms Subasic’s friend Kada Kotic was also standing just two or three yards from General Mladic. She heard him turn to his bodyguards and other soldiers clustered around him and say: “Brothers, use this chance well because we will never have an opportunity like this again.”

Their “opportunity” was to wipe out any possibility of future resistance by exterminating most of the men of Srebrenica. Ms Subasic’s son was dragged away and never seen again. Her husband Hilmo, 50, an engineer, was found in a mass grave.

The Mladic family’s own tragedy had come just over a year earlier. Ana had always been close to her father, a career soldier admired by his men for his willingness to eat and sleep with the ordinary troops.

A former senior official in the Serbian Government said that during a family celebration in the 1980s — when General Mladic had been a mid-ranking officer in the army of the united Yugolsavia — he had taken out his favourite pistol, won as an award at military school, and declared that he would only ever fire it to celebrate the birth of a Mladic grandson.

Ana allegedly replied that in that case she would keep the Mladic name when she married so that her father could one day fire the gun when she had a son.

General Mladic orchestrated the siege and shelling of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which would eventually claim at least 12,000 lives.

Ana died on March 24, 1994, with conflicting accounts saying her body was found in her blood-splattered bedroom, in a nearby park or in the woods near the Topcider cemetery. All accounts agreed that she was killed with her father’s treasured pistol.

Some of General Mladic’s supporters claimed that she had been depressed about the vilification of her father over atrocities committed by his troops. His critics contend that she took her life after being horrified by her father’s actions, perhaps even making her own tragic protest. Family members said she had always been ebullient until a study trip to Russia a few months earlier, which had left her depressed.

In Russia she may have been exposed for the first time to independent news reports about the atrocities being committed in the Balkans. The one-sided nature of Serbian media coverage was such that many Serbs were genuinely shocked last year by the broadcast of newly uncovered video footage showing Bosnian Serb troops killing civilian men at Srebrenica.

A third theory about Ana’s death — one widely held in Belgrade — is that she was murdered by hardline political or security forces who wanted to keep General Mladic in line. Proponents of that theory point out that it is unusual for a woman to choose a handgun when committing suicide, and that it was hard to believe she would use her father’s favourite pistol to do so.

Whatever the truth, it was after her death that Mladic is accused of ordering the murders, mass rapes and “ethnic cleansing” that became the biggest bloodbath in Europe since the Second World War.

According to Serbian media accounts, the distraught father asked the military doctor who performed the post-mortem examination, Zoran Stankovic, to retrieve the bullet from Ana’s brain and to cut off her hair so he could keep both for ever.

Mr Stankovic later told a Serbian magazine that he had formed a special bond with General Mladic, as he had done occasionally with families for whom he had performed autopsies. Mr Stankovic is now the Serbian Defence Minister whose forces have failed repeatedly to capture General Mladic.

The minister indignantly denies going soft in the hunt but his ministry was recently forced to admit that General Mladic had been allowed to keep drawing his military pension while supposedly on the run, and that serving and former members of the military had helped to shield him.

• Peter Wilson is Europe correspondent of The Australian