Little comfort for Mladic’s victims
NETHERLANDS: The man responsible for Europe’s last genocide was convicted of war crimes yesterday at The Hague.
Ratko Mladic, 74, the Bosnian Serb general who ordered the bloody siege of Sarajevo and the killing of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, was found guilty on 11 charges, including genocide, forcible transfer, hostage-taking and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to life in prison. He was found not guilty on one charge of genocide.
Judge Alphons Orie said Mladic acted with the intent to create ‘‘ethnically clean’’ areas in Bosnia by purging the country’s Muslim and Croat citizens. He was found to have planned and personally directed the shelling of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as well as the massacres of civilians around Srebrenica.
Mladic’s defence team tried to delay the judgment halfway through the session, claiming that his blood pressure was dangerously high and his health was at risk. The judge refused the request, prompting Mladic to rise from his seat and shout in Serbian. He was removed from the courtroom as the rest of the judgment was read out.
Mladic’s conviction brings to an end the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. More than 300 witnesses were called and 100,000 pieces of evidence presented in a trial that spanned four years.
Mladic is the last of the triumvirate who shaped Bosnia’s tragedy. Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in 2006 while being tried at the Hague, and Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was convicted last year for his role in the war’s atrocities and jailed for
40 years.
For the millions of Bosnians affected by his crimes, Mladic’s conviction comes as a relief, but with little reason to celebrate.
‘‘It’s not rejoicing or a time to be euphoric,’’ said Hariz Halilovich,
47, a former resident of Srebrenica and now a professor of social anthropology at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He was 25 when the massacre happened, and had already fled Bosnia. However, more than 70 members of his extended family and scores of his school friends were murdered.
‘‘Every time I am back in Bosnia, I think of the people who are not there,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t feel any kind of triumph, but I am happy that the verdict is as it is.‘‘
Mladic tried to claim that Serb soldiers had not acted on his command. However, two men who took part in the Srebrenica massacre testified that he had explicitly ordered the killings.
In Sarajevo, more than 11,000 people died under Mladic’s ruthless siege. From 1992 to 1995, his forces shelled the city while carrying out a campaign of terror against its Muslim population.
Nihada, who was 17 when the war started, lost her brother and her mother to the killers. She now lives in Australia but still fears retribution against her relatives in Bosnia, and declined give her full name.
‘‘I don’t think that justice will ever be there for the people who suffered,’’ she said. ‘‘I hope [Mladic] goes straight to hell when he dies.’’
Among Serb ultra-nationalists, however, Mladic is still considered a hero. Streets are named after him in Serbia and in the Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s autonomous Serbian entity.
‘‘What needs to be remembered is that Ratko Mladic was not some kind of private warlord. He was a commander of official Serbian troops,’’ Halilovic said. ‘‘It was well organised and part of a system, and the genocide was a crime of the state.’’