Mladić’s barbaric legacy is a growing cemetery and a country torn apart
The awful thing about Srebrenica was how the cemetery kept growing. Fresh headstones were added as the bodies of more victims were excavated and identified in a harrowing, forensic cataloguing of atrocity. There are 6,504 graves. But the memorial wall there lists the names of 8,372 – almost 2,000 who may never be laid to rest.
Those thousands, let us not forget, were killed – shot with pistol, rifle and machine-gun – in the worst massacre in post-second World War Europe. It seems like the slaughter of another age, another place – the industrial murder of mostly men and boys, some in their early teens. However, they were killed in 1995, in the 24-hour satellite news age, in a land now encircled by members of the European Union. That is Ratko Mladić’s true crime – to have brought atavistic barbarity back to a continent which, perhaps unwisely, thought such dark days were forever behind it.
Yet, as Mladić himself said, what did the politicians expect? He was just a soldier, he always protested, and his orders were ethnic cleansing. He pointed out as much to his political master, Radovan Karadžić, three years before Srebrenica. On May 12 1992 the Bosnian Serb parliament adopted the “strategic aim to separate Serb people from [Bosnia’s] other two national communities” – Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks), and Bosnian Croats. Mladić is reported to have warned: “People are not pebbles that can be moved from one place to another just like that...we cannot precisely arrange for only Serbs to stay in one part of the country while removing others painlessly.”
It was certainly not painless. Two million people, half the population, were displaced. Mladić knew it was a crime. For 14 years he went on the run.
Bosnia’s politics remain mired in stalemate, its economy is shattered, joblessness is out of control, its people, its media, even its children are divided along ethnic and sectarian lines. I remember one visit to Srebrenica, eight years after the killings, when the local imam, Muhamed Mehmedovic, told me: “Things are better than they were, of course. But the windows of the mosque have been broken. Worshippers have been intimidated. Remember, this is a town where murderers and their victims live side by side. How would you feel?”
Living side by side in Bosnia, however, is now the exception. Much of that is Mladić’s legacy.