BUTCHER OF BOSNIA GETS LIFE
After 16 years on the run and a five-year trial, savage Serb warlord finally pays the price for genocide
THE former army general who ordered the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica was yesterday jailed for life.
Ratko Mladic – dubbed the Butcher of Bosnia – orchestrated the shooting of unarmed victims before they were dumped in mass graves. It was the worst European massacre since the Second World War.
He also presided over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, in which 11,000 died.
The 74-year-old was found guilty of genocide, five charges of crimes against humanity and four of violating laws of war following a five-year trial at a UN tribunal in The Hague.
However the ex-commander of the Bosnian Serbs maintained his contempt for the hearing, grinning as he walked into court yesterday and giving a thumbs up.
He disrupted the hearing for more than half an hour by asking for a bathroom break. When he returned, his lawyers asked the case to be stopped because of his high blood pressure. The request was denied.
The former warlord then stood up and repeatedly shouted ‘this is all lies’ before being removed from the courtroom. He told judges: ‘Everything you said is pure lies. Shame on you!’
The verdicts were read in his absence, while he watched on a television screen in a neighbouring room.
Judge Alphons Orie said: ‘The crimes rank among the most heinous known to humankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity.’
He said Mladic attempted to create ‘ethnically clean’ areas in Bosnia by purging the country’s Muslim and Croat citizens during a civil war which claimed around 100,000 lives between 1992 and 1995.
Describing the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, Judge Orie added: ‘Many of these men and boys were cursed, insulted, threatened, forced to sing Serb songs and beaten while awaiting execution.’ Judge Orie told the Internathere tional Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia that Mladic’s men committed mass rapes of Muslim women and children, kept prisoners in concentration camps and deported thousands of families after burning their homes.
When the war ended, Mladic went into hiding – and was arrested in Serbia after 16 years on the run.
At the start of his trial in 2012, the warlord taunted survivors and victims’ families in the gallery with a chilling cutthroat gesture by running his hand across his throat.
The trial has heard from 377 witnesses and has seen 9,914
‘Heinous crimes’
exhibits. Mothers of Srebrenica’s victims applauded when the convictions were read out.
Nihada, who was 17 when the war started, said: ‘Even today, I don’t know how he can be human. I hope he goes straight to hell when he dies.’
The survivor, who now lives in Australia, did not want to give her full name for fear of retribution against her relatives still living in Bosnia.
‘[Mladic] used to come to our home with his guards and give us orders,’ she said.
‘Once, he grabbed my twoyear-old niece by the throat and held a knife to her neck.’ Nihada’s brother was taken away from the family home in Sarajevo by Mladic’s men in September 1992, and his body was later found in a nearby village. Her mother was killed in a massacre in the city’s main marketplace two years later.
‘I never found out what happened to my brother,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that justice will ever be there for the people who suffered.’
The tribunal found Mladic ‘significantly contributed’ to genocide in Srebrenica with the goal of destroying its Muslim population, ‘personally directed’ the long bombardment of Sarajevo and was part of a ‘joint criminal enterprise’ intended to purge Muslims and Croats from Bosnia.
Mladic is planning to appeal, however his sentencing effectively ends the UN trials against those who committed war crimes in Bosnia.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, died in 2006 while being tried at The Hague. Radovan Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was jailed for 40 years for his role in the atrocities.
After the hearing, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein called Mladic the ‘epitome of evil’ and said his conviction was a ‘victory for justice’.
John Dalhuisen, from Amnesty International, said: ‘This landmark verdict is a significant moment for international justice and sends a powerful message around the world that impunity cannot and will not be tolerated.’