Mladic accuses NATO of destroying Serbia and calls genocide accusation "diabolical garbage"

Former Bosnian Serb soldier Ratko Mladic, this Tuesday in The Hague, Handout. / Reuters

Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb general, said on Wednesday that his country was destroyed by NATO during the Balkan war, and has described the charge of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre (1995) as "diabolical garbage". 2017 a life sentence. The former commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb Army has spoken at the end of the appeal process against that conviction, after his lawyers warned the judges that they could not guarantee his cognitive ability given his poor health and the medicines he takes. In the conclusions, the defense has asked that the sentence be annulled and he be acquitted. The prosecution wants upholding the ruling. The decision of the judges of the Residual Mechanism for International Tribunals, which concludes the Balkan trials, is expected in 2021.

Looking tired, Mladic shook his head repeatedly throughout the day when prosecutors pointed to him as the lynchpin of the Srebrenica tragedy, where some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men were killed. When his turn came, he stressed that although the court is "the son of the Western powers, I am not a saint, but a soldier driven by destiny to defend my country, which those same powers set out to destroy." Over the course of ten minutes, he recalled that "I did not start the war," to later assure that he will continue to live "to represent my people, while the accusation [of genocide] will go down the drain [of history]" . To criticize the harshness of his sentence, he assured that "the court defended the Dutchbat", alluding to the battalion of blue helmets from the Netherlands in charge of protecting Srebrenica on behalf of the UN. Of the prosecutor, Laurel Baig, has asked the following: “Who is that blonde woman with the viperine tongue, who seems to have swallowed a snake, or in her place, the entire NATO prosecution? I am nothing of what he has called me, ”he said, referring to the genocide charge.

An appeal is not a new trial, but rather analyzes possible errors or omissions made in the original process, or if substantial evidence was lacking. In the second and final session dedicated to the case, the defense has insisted that Mladic is not a villain and did not plan to perpetrate genocide, but ordered the humanitarian evacuation of the women, the elderly and children in Srebrenica. Then he looked for war criminals among the males, "a practice of a war." If his subordinates later committed atrocities, "it is something that cannot be attributed to my client," concluded Dragan Ivetic, his lawyer.

The prosecution, on the contrary, has said that "Mladic's brutal legacy will affect entire generations, and only life imprisonment reflects the seriousness of crimes committed in a systematic and calculated way." According to the prosecutor Laurel Baig, the former military man “cannot excuse himself by saying that he was absent for a few days from the town, because the mass murders continued to take place: the troops followed his orders, he was informed at all times and never lost control, in addition to move the bodies buried in mass graves to other places to hide the crime.

Mladic was on the run from justice for 16 years and was arrested in Serbia in 2011. He was the latest fugitive from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which closed in December 2017 and is the predecessor of the Residual Mechanism. Its direct political boss, former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in March 2016, also for the Srebrenica genocide. Karadizc appealed, and the sentence was raised to life imprisonment in 2019 by the Mechanism itself, considering it insufficient.