Law catches up with ‘Butcher of Bosnia’
Former Serb commander Ratko Mladic led a relentless military campaign during the 1990s Bosnian war to ensure Muslims “vanished” from the territory, UN prosecutors said Monday.
At the height of the war triggered by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, Mr Mladic told the Bosnian Serbs they had an “opportunity to create not only any kind of state, but an allSerbian state.”
“His concern was not that Muslims might create a state, his concern was to have them vanish completely,” prosecutor Alan Tieger told judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Mr Mladic, 74, has denied 11 charges including two of genocide, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the bloody 1992-95 Bosnian conflict in which more than 100,000 people died and 2.2 million others were left homeless.
Prosecutors are wrapping up their case in three days of closing arguments in Mr Mladic’s trial, which began in May 2012, and are likely to ask for a long jail term. The defence will follow on Friday, but a verdict is not expected until next year.
Dressed in a grey suit and a blue and white tie, Mr Mladic appeared sombre but in good health Monday, after his trial has been dogged by his ill-health.
The brutish military commander came to symbolise a barbaric plan to rid multiethnic Bosnia of Croats and Muslims to establish an “ethnically pure” Greater Serbia.