Bosnians have finally got justice
The Hague tribunal shows the world won’t tolerate ethnic cleansing and it needs to be replicated
n the sterile setting of a courtroom in The Hague, the final chapter in the horrific events of the Bosnia war of 1992 to 1995 came to a close with the sentencing to life imprisonment of Ratko Mladic for genocide and crimes against humanity. The former Serbian military commander played a key role in the slaughter of thousands of innocent Bosnians during the siege of Sarajevo — the setting up and running of a detention gulag that took on all the horrific trappings of a Nazi concentration camp, and for the massacre of some 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in the closing days of the conflict.
Mladic is the last of the Serbian leadership of the war to be held accountable for their part in the horrific events following the breakup of the former nation of Yugoslavia, a series of wars that brought the worst onset of violence to Europe since the end of the Second World War. It was a conflict that exposed the ethnic and religious tensions of mini states that were bound together under Communist rule in Yugoslavia, and the end of the Soviet Union precipitated the inevitable conflict.
For Mladic, Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and others, the conflict represented an opportunity to settle historic and ethnic scores, unleashing a vicious Serbian nationality that displayed itself in uncompromising tactics on the battlefield and a disregard for human life that was criminal. It is to Mladic and his iron-fisted command of those in his ranks that we now have the term “ethnic cleansing”.
The events of the Bosnia war precipitated the setting of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, an independent investigative and judicial body that set about documenting the events of the conflict, assessing blame, and ensuring that those responsible for the worst crimes of the conflict would be held accountable. It showed that the international community had the capability of using the administration of jurisprudence to truly provide justice to the victims and survivors of conflict, and to hold political and military leadership to account.
With each passing day, the events of the Bosnia war are shrouded more in the mists of time. The work of the tribunal does provide a clear an unambiguous chapter for future historians that there were crimes committed, the international community cared, and that it stood by the Bosnian victims and provided a modicum of justice. Mladic can reflect on that now as he spends the rest of his years in a prison cell. He was no military hero, he was a cold-blooded killer.