BELGRADE, August 6, 2008 (AFP) - Serbia appealed Wednesday for the last two war crimes fugitives wanted by a UN tribunal, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, to give themselves up.

'I personally would like Mladic to surrender as soon as possible,' Defence Minister Dragan Sutanovac was quoted as saying in an interview published in the daily Blic.

'I have called on him to do so on a number of occasions, and this time I'm calling not just on him, but on Hadzic too, to turn themselves in,' said Sutanovac.

Surrender, the minister added, would be 'in the interests of Serbia and its citizens, and Mladic?s too.'

Mladic was 'holding the whole country hostage' by obstructing its integration into the European Union, which is conditioned on its cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Mladic, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity for atrocities including the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims during Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, has been on the run from the ICTY for more than a decade.

The 66-year-old former Bosnian Serb military commander is the most wanted war crimes fugitive after the arrest in Belgrade last month of Karadzic, his wartime political leader.

Hadzic, 49, has been at large since the ICTY unsealed his indictment in 2004 for war crimes in Croatia, where he was the leader of rebel Serbs during its 1991-1995 independence war.

The capture and transfer of Karadzic to the tribunal based in The Hague sparked violent protests in the Serbian capital by ultra-nationalists who consider him a hero.

'Karadzic's case clearly shows that nobody can hide for the rest of their lives,' Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister in charge of cooperation with the ICTY, said in a separate interview with the newspaper Vecernji Novosti.