Defiant ‘butcher of Bosnia’ gets life for massacre of thousands
RATKO MLADIĆ, the former Bosnian Serb military commander known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, was sentenced to life in prison yesterday after being convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The 74-year-old was found guilty of orchestrating massacres and ethnic cleansing during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, including the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, Europe’s worst atrocity since the Second World War.
The conviction, the final case of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, was hailed as a victory for justice and a warning to others – including Bashar al-assad, the Syrian president – that the passage of time offered no protection to perpetrators of genocide.
In a moment of drama Mladić was removed from the court in The Hague, minutes before the verdict, for screaming “this is all lies, you are all liars”.
The United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Mladić guilty of 10 out of 11 charges including the slaughter of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 civilians died.
The massacre at Srebrenica took place despite the area being officially declared a UN “safe area”. Dutch UN peacekeepers looked on helplessly as Serb forces separated men and boys to be shot, while women and children were bussed out of town in what became known as “ethnic cleansing”. Reading out the judgment, Alphons Orie, the presiding judge, said: “The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to humankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity.”
Mladić had denied all the charges and his legal team said he would be lodging an appeal.
The verdict was welcomed by the families of those who died including Fikret Alić whose skeletal features were featured in a front-page photo in Time magazine in 1992, staring out from behind the barbed wire of a detention camp. “Justice has won, and the war criminal has been convicted,” Mr Alić told reporters yesterday.
Mladić was among the most notorious of the 161 people indicted by the UN tribunal, along with Radovan Karadžić, the former Bosnian Serb leader, and Slobodan Milošević, the late Serbian president. The court has convicted 83 of these.
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, said the verdict shows war criminals will not escape justice. “Ratko Mladić’s conviction for genocide in Srebrenica will not bring back the thousands who lost their lives, but it does demonstrate that the architects of their suffering will be held to account,” he said.
Zeid Ra’ad al-hussein, the UN’S human rights chief, called Mladić the “epitome of evil” and said his conviction after 16 years on the run and more than four years on trial was a “momentous victory for justice”.