End to one of Europe’s most shameful chapters
Sentence of ‘the epitome of evil’ Mladic hailed as a victory for justice
THE HAGUE: It was the closing of one of Europe’s most shameful chapters of atrocity and blood-letting since World War II. With applause inside and outside the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
It was the last major item of business for the tribunal in The Hague before it wound down, a full quarter-century after many of the crimes on its docket were committed.
From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found Mladic, 75, was the chief military organiser of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats and other nonSerbs off their lands to cleave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.
The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45 000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in concentration camps.
Others perished in the siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorised residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8 000 Muslim men and boys after Mladic’s forces overran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica.
Sitting impassively at first in the court in a blue suit and tie, Mladic seemed much smaller than the burly commander in fatigues who had appeared before the media occasionally during the war to defend himself and his forces.
At one point, Mladic disappeared from the court, apparently to receive treatment for a dangerous surge in his blood pressure.
Upon returning, he began shouting at the court in a dispute over his blood pressure. “Everything you are saying is a pure lie,” he yelled at the Bench. The judges then ordered him removed.
In pronouncing the life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said Mladic’s crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind”. Mladic’s lawyers said they would appeal.
But if Mladic’s punishment drew a line of sorts – juridically at least – it was a halting and ambivalent marker between Europe’s epochs of uncertainty.
Far from the quieted theatres of Balkan conflict, nationalist passions, the clamour for redrawn frontiers and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.
Last month, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the Right, after Hungary and Poland.
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time.
In many lands, there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain’s planned departure from the EU.
Some of those passions are drawn from the angry response among Germans and other Europeans to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s readiness to open Germany’s frontiers to hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and elsewhere – many of whom passed through Serbia on their way north.
In Britain, many who voted in June last year to leave the EU did so, they said, out of resentment of outsiders’ influence over their destinies and the presence of what they saw as unchecked European immigrants.
In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade – and not a few convicted war criminals – are reclaiming positions of prominence. There is a sense, too, of unfinished business and resentments that the war did not heal.
Indeed, the trials of Mladic and others – including his political boss, Radovan Karadzic, who was jailed for 40 years on almost identical charges last year, and Milosevic, who died in 2006 before the end of his trial – may simply have intensified Serbia’s rancorous perceptions of being treated unfairly and Muslims’ sense of loss.
“Regardless of the verdict that we all feel as part of the campaign against Serbs, Ratko Mladic remains a legend of the Serb nation,” said Milorad Dodik, president of the Serb autonomous region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was carved out and cleansed of non-Serbs by Mladic’s wartime forces.
Sead Numanovic, a Bosnian journalist in Sarajevo who fought against Mladic’s forces, said: “This verdict, like all the others, will not bring back sons to their mothers, dead brothers to their sisters and husbands to their wives.”
The sense of victimhood among Serbs seemed to have been trumped on Wednesday by the sentencing of Mladic, which all but confirmed Bosnian Muslim resentments that the Serbs had succeeded in advancing their territorial ambitions by genocide.
“This should all have been behind us by now,” said Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. “The only thing that is behind us is that war.”
On both sides of the enduring ethnic divide, there was a feeling that the pronouncements of robed judges at The Hague will have no perceptible impact on the practicalities of eking out an existence in straitened times.
Bosnians in Sarajevo, who once ran from snipers’ bullets and sheltered from incessant shelling by Mladic’s artillery, have traded those perils for a dysfunctional government and joblessness.
In Belgrade, the crumbling socialist-era grandeur harks back to better times, when the city was the capital of a moderately developed Yugoslavia with a population of 22 million, rather than the impoverished republic it is today.
Coupled with that is a lingering memory not just of the war in Bosnia and Croatia of the early 1990s, but also of the fighting in Kosovo. To this day, banners in front of the parliament building hold the Clintons responsible for the widely resented 78-day Nato campaign that drove Serb-dominated forces out of Kosovo, enabling it to declare independence in 2008.
Commenting on the trial outcome, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilised world”.
For advocates of human rights, the judgment – the culmination of a trial that began in 2012 only to be interrupted by Mladic’s health problems – was historic. The UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called it “a momentous victory for justice” and declared “Mladic the epitome of evil”.
It was also the first trial in which prosecutors presented evidence from recently explored mass graves around an open-pit mine at Tomasica, near Prijedor in northern Bosnia, where Muslims were herded into concentration camps, tortured, raped and killed during the ethnic cleansing campaign.– The New York Times