‘Butcher of Bosnia’ found guilty of genocide
Ratko Mladic given life in prison in last Balkan war crimes trial
BERLIN — Ratko Mladic, a former Serb warlord who commanded forces that carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Balkan wars, was found guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity by an international tribunal Wednesday.
Mladic, 74, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the bloodiest chapter of European history since World War II.
His conviction on 10 counts of 11 counts marks the last major prosecution by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which the U.N. Security Council set up more than two decades ago.
“Mladic is the epitome of evil, and the prosecution of Mladic is the epitome of what international justice is all about,” said U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein.
Also at The Hague to witness the verdict were survivors, including those who had been held in concentration camps and mothers who lost their children during a merciless yearslong military campaign against Bosnian Muslims that the court ruled amounted to an extermination attempt.
Survivors applauded and wept as the decision by the three-judge panel was read, with many saying it represented a just punishment for a man dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia.”
The judgment came after a trial that lasted more than four years, and involved testimony from nearly 600 witnesses.
They recounted a litany of horrors carried out by forces under Mladic’s command during the war in Bosnia from 1992-95, which claimed upward of 100,000 lives.
The atrocities included sniper attacks, indiscriminate shelling, mass executions, and imprisonment in camps where people died of malnourishment and disease.
The most horrific was the Mladic-directed July 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, a supposed U.N. safe haven. Mladic was also convicted of orchestrating the destruction of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, through a four-year siege punctuated by shelling and sniper fire.
Mladic, an ultranationalist, viewed the war as a chance for Serbs to avenge hundreds of years of occupation by Muslim Turks. Wednesday’s judgment found that he persecuted Croats and Muslims with the intent to create “ethnically clean” territories.
“Circumstances were brutal,” Alphons Orie, the presiding judge said in reading the verdict. “Those who tried to defend their homes were met with ruthless force. Mass executions occurred and victims succumbed after being beaten. Many of the perpetrators who had captured Bosnian Muslims, showed little or no respect for human life or dignity.”