Why wasn’t Mladic arrested earlier?

How did Ratko Mladic escape arrest for so long? Writing in this week’s issue of the Spectator (buy it here), Charlotte Eager remembers her nervous summers with the azure-eyed butcher, in the course of which she writes:

“Why wasn’t Mladic arrested before? After all, British, French and US special forces wandered Bosnia freely for many years after the end of the war and he used to be spotted in restaurants, boils and all. The problem, according to some ex-SAS chums, was that our governments wanted Mladic to be taken alive. ‘That would not have been possible then,’ said one: back then, his thugs were still pumped up enough to die for him. Sixteen years after the war, the adrenalin has ebbed. Mladic’s praetorians are bodyguarding Serb oligarchs or back tending their pigs, and the azure-eyed warlord is a shifty pensioner with a withered hand. And Serbia has traded its bloodstained mythmaker for hope of the EU.”