Ratko Mladic: a war criminal’s legacy

There was no remorse. When he entered the court last week, Ratko Mladic gave a defiant thumbs up to the cameras. And as the charges were read out, he screamed abuse at the judges and had to be dragged out. Thus, the former Bosnian Serb general known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” was not present as he was sentenced to life in prison for genocide and other war crimes. His conviction was a fitting end to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY): having indicted 161 people involved in the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia, it will now be wound up. (By contrast, 22 senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg.) The wheels of justice turned slowly, said Tony Barber in the FT, partly because several suspects, Mladic included, spent years on the run. But the ICTY wasn’t only set up to dispense justice: its purpose was also to record history. Given the key role Mladic played in two of the war’s greatest atrocities, the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, his trial was “particularly important”.

One of the terrible things about Srebrenica was how the cemetery kept growing, said Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. “Fresh headstones kept being added, as more bodies were excavated in a forensic cataloguing of atrocity.” There are now 6,504 graves, but the memorial there lists 8,372 people: Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were killed by Mladic’s forces in July 1995. Mladic knew it was genocide: he had told his political master, Radovan Karadžic, that the “strategic aim” of the Bosnian Serb parliament – to separate Serbs from Bosnian Muslims and Croats – could not be achieved “painlessly”. And this fierce nationalist embraced his task in the interests of a “Greater Serbia”. The massacre was the height of his brutality, but there was much else that the court didn’t class as genocide, said Ed Vulliamy in The Guardian: villages razed; civilians, including babies, burnt alive; women herded into camps to be violated. And I’m sceptical of the claim that this verdict sends a message to other war criminals. No one is likely to be indicted for war crimes in Syria, Yemen or Myanmar; genocide retains a hideous logic of its own to its perpetrators. It gave Mladic what he wanted: a Bosnian Serb statelet where he is venerated and to which non-serbs dare not return. He may be “a furious man, but he can start his sentence with the satisfaction of a mission in no small part accomplished”.