Profile of a murderer.
A protagonist of the Yugoslav Wars, the Serbian general was responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II.
John Tenth
06/19/2021 6:00 AM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 06/19/2021 6:00 AM
Surrounded by soldiers and in front of television cameras, Ratko Mladic stroked the boy's head with fatherly affection and sought to calm his fears.
No one else will be hurt
, there is nothing to fear, you will not be deported, he assured him.
While the Serbian general spoke, his men distributed chocolates among the terrified women who had approached the place hopeful for the possibility that, now, the violence was over.
Away from the media, however, thousands of troops formed a cordon around Srebrenica to
prevent anyone from escaping the Bosnian enclave
, which had just fallen under Serbian control.
A video capture of the moment when Ratko Mladic tries to reassure a Bosnian boy before the Srebrenica massacre.
Photo:
Mladic toured the city after his television appearance and, according to
The New York Times
in a profile on the general, in front of his soldiers and Bosnian television journalists he recalled the slaughter of Serbs that the Ottoman Turks had carried out in the region 190 years before.
"We give this city as a gift to the Serbian people," he said.
"
The time for revenge has come
."
It was July 10, 1995. Over the next ten days, thousands of women would be raped, and around
8,000 men and boys would be executed
by Serbian soldiers in Srebrenica, one of the most horrifying episodes that occurred during the Bosnian War, an ethnic and religious conflict that erupted after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and lasted between 1992 and 1995.
In addition to marking a turning point in the conflict, the Srebrenica massacre, considered the worst in Europe since World War II, was the most brutal display of the military actions of Ratko Mladic,
known as “the Bosnian butcher”.
From the siege of Sarajevo in 1992 onwards, the Serbian general made ethnic cleansing and mass executions his insignia and
modus operandi
.
Paradoxically, his brutality was also the reason for his downfall, as what happened in Srebrenica generated outrage in the international community and
accelerated NATO intervention
to end the conflict.
The recent confirmation by a Hague court of his life sentence in 2017 for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed more than two decades ago is reassurance that Mladic will die in prison.
With this instance, all the judicial processes for those responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the conflict were ended, which left more than
100,000 dead and 2.2 million displaced.
The 79-year-old former general was the last to face justice, as he managed to evade capture until he was arrested in 2011, after spending
16 years on the run
.
The Potocari Memorial Center in Srebrenica, the site of the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
Photo: EFE
The other two architects of the genocide were former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in prison in 2006 at age 64, and psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic, 75, the former president of the Republika Srpska between 1992 and 1996, who He was sentenced in 2016
to 40 years in prison for the same crimes
.
From Yugoslav boy to warlord
Angry and brutal for some, gay and flamboyant for others, Mladic is a war criminal to the world, but for many Serbs he
remains a hero in love with “his land”
, who sought to protect it from those whom he called the “Turks”, Muslim Bosnians.
Mladic himself has never been sorry for what he did during the Bosnian War, he always displayed a haughty posture and claimed that his actions had been forced by his enemies, and
required to avoid the extermination of the Serbs
.
A scholar of historical military leaders and strategists such as Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and Carl von Clausewitz, once asserted that "borders have always been
drawn in blood, and states, delimited by tombs
."
At a protest in 2011, Bosnian Serbs are seen holding posters of Ratko Mladic near the general's hometown.
Photo: AP
Born in 1942 in Bozanovici, a poor peasant village in southern Bosnia, Mladic had never identified himself as a “Serbian” until the time of the war, as
he considered himself a Yugoslav
, committed to the multi-ethnic project that had been forged in the second half of the 20th century.
A difficult conviction between three dominant groups, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians, that the dictator Josip Broz, known as "Marshal Tito", had
managed to keep under control in the former Yugoslavia.
Mladic suffered from ethnic tension firsthand.
His father, Neđa Mladic, was assassinated in 1945 by Ustasha, a
Croatian terrorist organization allied to Nazism
.
"We Serbs are the only nation on the planet that decided to unite with a people who had tried to exterminate us, and who were our enemies," said the general on some occasion.
Ratko Mladic completed his studies at a military academy at the age of 15 and later joined the Yugoslav People's Army.
He also
joined the Yugoslav Communist Party
, and was a member of the group until its dissolution in 1990.
His immersion in the Yugoslav Wars, which began with a first mission in Kosovo in 1991, was the turning point for his
becoming a militant for the Serbian cause
.
"At the time, I never considered that we couldn't have a life together," Mladic said in a later interview with
The New York Times
.
"We were all captivated by that possibility. But
a man is shaped by the events he goes through,
" he completed.
Mladic's military rise was prompted by his role in a series of clashes in the Krajina region in 1991. At that time, the Serbs were seeking to maintain their autonomy in a region within Croatian territory, and Mladic was sent to assist them.
The success of Mladic's mission, carried out according to his critics
thanks to his brutality
, caused him to be promoted to general in 1992, and made him the chosen one to carry out Serbian military actions in the conflict that was opening in Bosnia.
Ethnic bloodbath
The Bosnian War was an armed conflict within the Yugoslav Wars, a series of
war episodes that were generated after the dissolution of Yugoslavia
.
After Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in 1991, the Bosnia-Herzegovina region also sought to separate and create a new autonomous state.
While Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosnians had coexisted in the region at least since the time of the Ottoman Empire, the decision of what to do after the Yugoslav collapse sharply divided the population along ethnic lines.
While the Muslim Croats and Bosnians wanted independence, the Serbs wanted to remain part of what was left of Yugoslavia, essentially Serbia.
A photo from 2002 showing a poster offering a reward for the capture of Radovan Karadzic, President of the Sprska Republic, and Ratko Mladic.
Photo: AP
The conflict was unleashed after the
declaration of independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina
in 1992, because the Serbian population rebelled against this resolution and sought to create a new entity called the
Republika Srpska
(Serbian Republic).
Hand in hand with the president of this proto state, Radovan Karadžić, and supported by the president of Serbia and a benchmark of Serbian nationalism, Slobodan Milosevic, the Republika Srpska embarked on a bloody warlike enterprise marked by
war crimes and the genocide of the civil population.
The military face of this company, and the third member of the horror triad, was none other than General
Ratko Mladic.
As the highest military commander, Mladic was directly responsible for actions that
marked the conflict due to their viciousness and brutality
.
He was in charge of commanding the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the longest siege of a city in the history of modern warfare.
Starting in May 1992, Serbian troops blocked access to the city and
cut off water and electricity supplies
.
From there, they dedicated themselves to bombarding the city, while snipers terrorized the civilian population, since anyone could be shot in the street while walking without doing anything else.
The Srebrenica massacre is the pinnacle of Serbian barbarism.
Although the Muslim-majority city had been under attack since the beginning of the war, the scale of the massacre perpetrated by Mladic and his troops breaks with everything that had been experienced until then.
The magnitude of the tragedy was increased in turn because Mladic took the city, despite the fact that
the UN had declared it a "safe zone"
to try to protect it.
Investigators from the court investigating war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia unearth a mass grave with victims of the Srebrenica massacre.
Photo: AP
Based in a nearby base, the UN Blue Helmets were overwhelmed by the arrival of civilians seeking protection from Serbian troops.
Without weapons or air support, they could do nothing but watch as Mladic's men
separated the Muslim men and teenagers from the women
and hauled them away in trucks to execute them.
About 8,000 Muslim men and youths were killed and buried in mass graves.
The
magnitude of the massacre shocked Washington
and European capitals, which quickly decided to take action on the matter.
NATO authorizes Operation Deliberate Force, a bombing campaign against the Army of the Republic Sprksa that lasted between August 30 and September 12.
The military campaign accelerated the peace negotiations, which resulted in the Dayton Peace Agreement, signed on December 14, 195 in Paris,
ending the Bosnian War.
As for Ratko Mladic, an International Criminal Court charged him with genocide and war crimes shortly after the Srebrenica massacre, and calls for his arrest.
Mladic managed to evade capture and became an international fugitive.
It would take
16 years for the general to be imprisoned in May 2011
, in a region in northern Serbia.
An account of the horror
Accusations of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity began to appear from the beginning of the Bosnian War.
All subsequent international observers have agreed that
the overwhelming majority were committed by Serbian troops
against Bosnian Muslims, a level of barbarism not seen in Europe since World War II.
In the trial of Mladic at the Hague Court in 2017, the judges reviewed in detail the plan of horror carried out by the Serbian general at the head of the Army of the Republic Sprksa.
In their ruling, a 2,526-page brief drawn up based on nearly 600 witnesses and 10,000 pieces of evidence, the magistrates detailed the crimes committed by Mladic's troops as part of a
campaign of terror to expel Bosnian
Muslims and Croats from the mini Serbian state in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
General Ratko Mladic in June 2021, just before his life sentence was confirmed.
Photo: AP
The writing offers a list of the horror:
-The
systematic rape
of women and girls up to 10 years of age.
-The deliberate murder of civilians who walked with their children through the streets during
the siege of Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1996.
-The taking of hostages by UN security forces to prevent NATO attacks.
-The random murder of Croatian and Bosnian prisoners of war.
-The massacre of
more than 8 thousand men and young people
in Srebrenica.
"The crimes are among the
worst committed in the history of mankind,
" said Chief Judge Alphons Orie, before sentencing Mladic to life imprisonment.
One of the frustrated goals of the trial was to try to uncover the
motivation behind the crimes
committed by Mladic and his troops.
In that sense, the ruling points to statements that the Serbian general had made on other occasions that Muslim fighters in Srebrenica had already killed Serbian civilians in the same war.
He also pointed to the reference, noted above, that Mladic had made on television while walking through Srebrenica regarding the fact that the Ottoman Empire had massacred the Serbian population during his reign.
The general displayed his resentment at this intervention by
disparagingly describing the Muslims
he had evacuated as "Turks."
While the general conclusion tended to assume that racism was the sole explanation for Mladic's motives, not everyone was convinced.
Carl Bildt, a UN peace envoy who met with Mladic during the conflict and demanded that he protect the people of Srebrenica, told
The New Yorker
magazine
after the trial that
the motivations remained a mystery to him
.
“Perhaps they were overwhelmed by the logistics of having to take care of thousands of prisoners, or it was because of this that
anger and the desire for revenge consumed them
, and led them towards what they believed was the best way to resolve the situation.
I don't know, and it's something that I'm still struggling to understand, ”he explained.
Many clarifications never came from Mladic.
And he remained defiant until the end.
“This is all a lie!” He
yelled at the judging panel as the verdict was read.
"You should be ashamed of yourself!" He repeated before being escorted out of the room.
The Serbian general resorted to
various appeals over the years
.
After being briefly interned in 2019, he requested that hospital facilities be extended outside the Hague detention center, which he was also denied.
The judicial instances of Mladic ended up being exhausted with the confirmation of his sentence on June 8, putting an end to any aspiration that at some point he can recover his freedom.
Present in court that day was Munira Subašić, the president of the NGO Mothers of Srebrenica.
In the July 1995 massacre perpetrated by Serbian troops, her husband and 17-year-old son Nermin were killed.
In the testimony she gave during the Mladic trial, the woman recounted how a Serbian soldier snatched her son from her arms and put him on a bus, while telling him not to worry.
Subašić never saw or his son again
, and was only able to retrieve some of his remains from a mass grave.
Her husband's remains were fully recovered, and they were buried in 2004.
In dialogue with the newspaper
The Guardian
after the confirmation of Mladic's conviction, the woman confessed that the procedure had removed emotions that she had not felt for a long time and that although there was no such thing as justice for the death of a child, the Life imprisonment for the murderer was the closest thing there was.
"This victory is not only for us, but for all mothers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whether they are Serbs, Bosnians or Croats.
Every mother suffers,
" he added.
PJB
Look also
Srebrenica, three years of ordeal and a massacre that nobody forgets in Bosnia
The Hague confirmed life imprisonment against former Serbian military chief Ratko Mladic, the “Bosnian butcher”
