Manchester (England): On Wednesday, after 24 years’ work, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia will effectively shut down.
Before its files are stored in archives, its lawyers and staff move on to other career challenges, it has one last — and perhaps most important — piece of unfinished business to conclude: The sentencing of Ratko Mladic on two counts of genocide and nine of war crimes against humanity.
The self-styled “Butcher of Bosnia” is now a 75-year-old frail and pale shell of the thick-jawed, clean-cut and camouflaged leader of Serbian forces who brought slaughter, bloodshed, starvation and mass graves to thousands during the 1992-1995 war in the former Yugoslav states. The tribunal has indicted more than 160 people, ranging from guards at the infamous Omarska camp, where television images of gaunt, emaciated and starving prisoners triggered comparison with those from Hitler’s death camps, to those who held the bloody siege of Sarajevo in place, and those who pulled the triggers as some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred at Srebrenica.
And it is Mladic who stands accused of perpetrating that bloody killing spree.
The events at Srebrenica happened over a few days in the summer of 1995, part of an alleged plan to exterminate the Bosniaks and create an ethnically pure Serb state. He is also accused over the Serbs’ 44-month siege of Sarajevo, in which an estimated 10,000 people died.
He came to epitomise Serb defiance during the Bosnian war and is blamed for the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War.
When he first faced the judges six years ago June, Mladic insisted he was only “defending my country”, a show of bravado typical for the man, showing his defiance was undimmed by 16 years on the run.
He may be markedly older and thinner since the days when, dressed in fatigues, he commanded his forces, but his military salute to the judges and his combative responses showed undimmed conviction.
Born on March 12, 1942 at Bozinovici in eastern Bosnia, Mladic was two years old when his father was killed by Croatia’s World War II fascist authorities, the Ustasha.
In June 1991, as Yugoslavia crumbled and war broke out, Mladic, then a colonel in the Yugoslav National Army, was given the task of organising the Serb-dominated army from the Serb rebels’ stronghold Knin in Croatia.
The following year, Mladic, now a general, was made commander of Bosnian Serb forces and fought to link up Serb-held lands in Bosnia’s east and west.
Mladic was indicted for war crimes after his troops overran the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and was present as some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were led away to their deaths. At the start of the war, he accused Muslims of the worst horrors and was quoted as saying they “impale Serbs, burn them alive, crucify them and put out their eyes”.
Chillingly, he is also alleged to have said: “Borders are always drawn in blood and states marked out with graves.”
His message, that he and his men were fighting in the name of “Greater Serbia”, made him a hero to many of his people and a one-time favourite of late Serbian and Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic.
When he refused to bow to Western demands to withdraw his heavy weapons from around Sarajevo in September 1995, after a three and a half years long siege, it took the combined might of Nato warplanes and cruise missiles to blow apart his military advantage.
Karadzic sacked Mladic but was forced to reinstate him. However, Mladic finally became too much of a liability and was sacked by the Bosnian Serb government in 1997 following growing international pressure over his war crimes indictment.
He became a reclusive figure in post-war Bosnia.
For a long time he was holed up in his main command bunker at Han Pijesak, calmly defying Nato attempts to arrest him as he regularly threatened to bathe in the blood any soldiers who attempted to detain him.
He also often came to Belgrade, where his family lived, until he moved to the Serbian capital. Until Milosevic’s ouster in October 2000, Mladic lived openly in Belgrade, visiting cafés, restaurants and football matches.
But his popularity was waning among politicians in Serbia, increasingly concerned that failure to transfer Mladic to the UN war crimes court would mean further delay in the country’s joining the European Union.
Instead of roaming freely around Belgrade in a disguise, like Karadzic had done, Mladic then vanished, finding refuge in army barracks.
As the Serbian authorities cracked down on Mladic’s support network, he became more and more reliant on his extended family to hide him, which eventually spelt his downfall.
Mladic was arrested in a village in northeastern Serbia in May 2011 where he was hiding in a relative’s house.
Since his transfer to the tribunal’s detention unit, Mladic has complained of health problems at each of his court appearances.
His lawyer Branko Lukic was quoted as saying that the former general’s health is “very bad”, and that he needed a wheelchair to get around.
Married to Bosiljka, Mladic has a son, Darko, and two grandchildren.
His daughter Ana committed suicide in Belgrade in 1994 at age 23, reportedly with her father’s favourite pistol, having been unable to cope with the burden of accusations over Mladic’s wartime crimes.
— With inputs from agencies
