Former Bosnian Serb Army general Ratko Mladic will be remembered by most as a ruthless war criminal, but despite his convictions for genocide and crimes against humanity, he is still seen a hero by Serb ultranationalists.
After a repeated reports that the health of Ratko Mladic was deteriorating severely and his life was coming to an end, the former Bosnian Serb Army general died on Thursday in the United Nations detention centre in The Hague at the age of 84.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslaumanity, convicting him of some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II and jailing him for life
Mladic was convicted of genocide of Bosniaks in the eastern town of Srebrenica in 1995, the persecution and extermination of Bosniaks and Croats across the country, terrorising the population of Sarajevo with a campaign of shelling and sniper attacks, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
But he was acquitted of committing genocide in six other Bosnian municipalities in 1992.
It is for Srebrenica – the systematic killings of Bosniak men and boys and the subsequent cover-up operation – that Mladic will be remembered by history. According to the ICTY’s indictment, “more than 7,000 prisoners captured in the area around Srebrenica were summarily executed from 13 July to 19 July 1995. The killings continued thereafter.”
The Bosnian Serb Army and Serb paramilitary formations tried to hide the extent of the crimes by burying victims in mass graves. A total of 95 mass graves have been discovered around the Srebrenica area; seven were primary mass graves, where bodies were initially buried. The rest of them were secondary or tertiary grave, to which bodies were moved in subsequent cover-up attempts.
The ICTY rejected Mladic’s appeal against his conviction in June 2021, finally bringing some kind of justice to thousands of families of people who were killed.
Refija Hadzibulic, one of the mothers of the victims of the Srebrenica genocide, said at the time that the final verdict was a recognition of their suffering.
“It means a lot to us to know that there was a genocide, that they committed genocide. Because they always deny it. And now they can’t deny it, the whole world sees what happened and what they did,” Hadzibulic said.
But Bosnian Serb political leaders still see Mladic as a hero who fought to defend Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity of the country that was established, with Radovan Karadzic as its leader, just before the war erupted in 1992.
Milorad Dodik, who has long been the most powerful Bosnian Serb politician, said that the Mladic verdict had “nothing to do with law and justice”.
Dodik claimed that the trial was held in order to “Satanise” Serbs, and complained that “an attempt is being made to create a myth about the genocide in Srebrenica, which did not happen”.
A family legacy of war
Ratko Mladic before the pronouncement of the appeal judgment in his case in The Hague, June 2021. Photo: EPA-EFE/Jerry Lampen/Pool.
Mladic was born in 1943 in the Bosnian village of Bozinovci, some 70 kilometres south of the capital Sarajevo.
He was the child of a Yugoslav Communist Partisan family, and his father was killed in one of the last battles of World War II, which inspired him to take his father’s steps and enrol in a military school in Belgrade.
He had his first taste of war in the spring of 1991 when the Yugoslav People’s Army sent him to the Croatian city of Knin to assist Serb rebels there. Knin served as a Serb stronghold at the time.
For the attack on village Kijevo near Knin, which he ordered in August 1991, Mladic was sentenced to 20 years in prison by the county court in the Croatian town of Sibenik.
According to the ICTY, the attack on Kijevo was the moment when the Yugoslav People’s Army, under Mladic’s command, openly took the Serb side in the conflict.
After Yugoslav troops seized the village, local Serbs entered and took it over. This model was then used all over the former Yugoslagovina and Kosovo
When the war started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic didn’t want to be perceived as an aggressor. His decision was to supply the Bosnian Serb Army with weapons and personnel, while Mladic was appointed to be the main military strategist.
In the years that followed, the Bosnian Serb Army adopted Mladic’s aggressive style of warfare, spreading death and fear amongst non-Serb civilians. Thousands were killed, and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. Towns like Foca, Prijedor and Visegrad were systematically cleared of Bosnian Muslims.
The war in Bosnia ended in November 1995 with the signing of the Dayton peace agreement. A year later, after being indicted by the ICTY prosecution, Mladic moved to Serbia. He was now Europe’s most wanted man.
On the run in Serbia
The Srebrenica Memorial Centre, where genocide victims are buried, July 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR
Mladic never conducted his military campaigns in secrecy and often let TV crews record his every step. He enjoyed huge support from Serb nationalists and the Serbian authorities, who gave him protection after the war despite the fact that he was wanted by the Hague court.
From 1996 until 2003, Mladic was protected by the Serbian military establishment. But following the ousting of authoritarian leader Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia adopted a law on cooperation with the ICTY and Mladic had to go on the run.
He managed to stay hidden thanks to his network of supporters until May 2011, when police special forces raided a house owned by one of his relatives in the village of Lazarevac. While many celebrated his arrest, his supporters gathered in huge protests in Belgrade and several towns in Republika Srpska.
For the nine years of his trial, Mladic kept denying the charges and insisted that he acted to defend Serbs. “My goal is simple – the protection of Serb territory and the people who have lived there for ages,” he said during the war.
Mladic is still seen as a hero by some Serb ultranationalists, although his final verdict in 2021 did not provoke demonstrations on the same scale as his arrest ten years earlier.
Nevertheless, the persistent appearance of murals and graffiti glorifying Mladic in Belgrade and in some Bosnian towns in recent years indicates that, more than 30 years after the Srebrenica killings, genocide denial remains widespread in Republika Srpska and in Serbia, despite the verdicts of international courts.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, a law banning genocide denial and glorification of war criminals was imposed in 2021 by the then High Representative Valentin Inzko, the international official responsible for overseeing the implementation of the peace accords that ended the war. This curbed open support for Mladic, although he remains a symbol to Serb extremists – and to survivors of the Bosnian war, who will never forget the atrocities committed by the army that he commanded.
Source: balkaninsight.com
