‘Butcher of Bosnia’ faces verdict
6: Former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic will on Tuesday hear the decision on his appeal against his genocide conviction, in a Hague tribunal’s final verdict on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The ruling will be the closing chapter in the case against the man dubbed the “Butcher of the Balkans”, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by a UN war crimes tribunal in 2017.
Now an ailing 78-yearold, the once-burly military strongman of the 19921995 Bosnian war is expected to be in court, where he has previously delivered angry outbursts against the West.
Mothers of some of the 8,000 men and boys killed in the worst act of bloodshed on European soil since World War II will be outside the court where they have long campaigned for justice. “We will go to The Hague to look the executioner in the eye once again as he is finally sentenced,” Munira Subasic, president of one of the “Mothers of Srebrenica” associations, said. The verdict will be handed down at 1300 GMT, viewable on a livestream with a half hour delay because the courtroom is closed to journalists due to Coronavirus restrictions, at the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.
Its prosecutor Serge Brammertz said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the verdict, telling reporters this week he “can’t imagine another outcome than confirmation”.
The mechanism deals with cases left over from the now-closed UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia, which brought justice for crimes in the bloody break-up of the country in the 1990s. Mladic, who spent a decade on the run before his capture in 2011, was convicted of one count of genocide over Srebrenica as well as for war crimes and crimes against humanity in general during the Bosnian war.