First Osama Bin Laden, now Ratko Mladic. But while the Bosnian Serb commander enjoyed nothing like the profile of the Al Qaeda leader, his was a considerably greater butcher's bill.
For many Serbs, General Mladic is a war hero rather than a national disgrace. But while he was still at large their country remained a European pariah. The intriguing question about his arrest concerns its timing and, as with Bin Laden, how many people in high places had known of his whereabouts all along.
The 69-year-old 'Butcher of Bosnia' had been living a life of quiet obscurity in the village of Lazarevo, just 50 miles from the Serbian capital Belgrade, where he posed as just another retired soldier.
Although said to be in poor health after more than a decade on the run he was carrying two pistols when he was seized on Thursday by Serbian security forces, apparently acting on a tip-off. He failed however to carry out an earlier promise to go down fighting rather than be taken alive.
He will now be extradited to the Hague to stand trial for a litany of pitiless war crimes. Burly, brutish and unrepentant, Mladic was a key military player throughout the genocidal civil wars of Yugoslavia's disintegration, which saw the deaths of 200,000 of its citizens.
But he is most notorious for his presiding roles in the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebenica. The latter was the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.
No exact figure can be put on the number of unarmed Bosnian Muslim boys and men who were executed when Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN 'safe haven' in July 1995.
When Mladic stands in the dock at the international war crimes court in the Hague to hear his indictment read out the murders will be put at 'more than 7,000'. Some 25,000 Muslim women, children and elderly were also expelled from the region.
It was the nadir of the ethnic cleansing military campaigns that marked the Yugoslav conflict. It is an irony that its perpetrator will now stand trial in the Netherlands, the country whose soldiers, operating under the UN flag, shamingly stood by and let the massacre take place.
Mladic was born in 1941 in a village near Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina. His father was killed shortly before the Second World War ended, while taking part in a partisan attack on Axis forces.
Yugoslavia had been created at the end of the First World War. It was a sprawling artificial compromise, knitted together by the exigencies of Great Power politics. After the Second World War, only Tito's communist dictatorship kept the federation of republics together.
By the post-Tito late 1980s, Yugoslavia's many different ethnic groups - Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenes and Muslim Bosnians and Albanians - were living in a state of increasing political, religious and ethnic tension.
In 1991, Slovenia ceded from Yugoslavia. Then the rest of the federation fell violently apart with first Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, following suit.
Serbia, the strongest power, was desperate to hold the fractious state together, or at least grab as much land as possible before it disintegrated.
Young Mladic had been a high-flying student at an army officer academy. By the time Yugoslavia began to crumble he was a deputy garrison commander fighting for territory against the forces of the breakaway Croat republic.
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| Grief: Srebrenica cry over their missing men in the refugee camp at the Tuzla airport in a July 14, 1995 file photo. |
The following spring, largely Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Mladic was put in command of the Yugoslav federal forces which closed a ring of armour and artillery around Sarajevo, the Bosnian Muslims' new capital.
Thus began a bloody siege which was to last for nearly four years. 'Burn their brains,' Mladic once bellowed as his men pounded the city with artillery fire.
By now Bosnia-Herzegovina was divided into competing Serb and Muslim factions and in May 1992 the Serbian elements broke away and formed their own army.
Local boy Mladic was made commander. His defining battle was to be his capture of the mining town of Srebrenica.
In April 1993, after a year of see-saw battles for control of the area, the outside world tried to intervene. The UN Security Council declared Srebrenica and its environs a 'safe area' for Bosnian Muslims.
It was nothing of the sort. The Serb grip tightened, conditions inside became critical and in March 1995 the Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic gave the order that Srebrenica be overrun.
The offensive began on July 6. Dutch-manned UN observation posts either surrendered or were abandoned. Thousands of Muslim refugees from outlying areas began to pour into the centre.
Mladic took hands-on control of the operation. By July 11, he was successful enough to be able to enter Srebrenica on foot, followed by a Serb TV crew. Footage shows him talking to camera as if he were a tour guide.
By that evening some 30,000 terrified civilians had sought sanctuary at the UN compound at Potocari.
The Dutch battalion based there had done little to stem the advance of the Serbs, who threatened to harm the Dutch soldiers already taken prisoner. What followed will remain a stain on UN peacekeeping and the Dutch military in particular. According to witnesses, under the very eyes of the UN soldiers, Mladic's troops began to move among the hysterical crowds around Potocari, carrying out sporadic executions, rapes and mutilations.
Girls as young as 12 are said to have been gang raped. Children were allegedly decapitated, crying babies had their throats cut. Some refugees committed suicide to escape the cruelty. By then Mladic had met the Dutch commander and told him the Muslims must hand over any weapons or 'vanish'. The Dutch officer drank a toast with him. His men, he said, would not interfere and were eventually allowed to leave, without their weapons or supplies (seven years later a Dutch cabinet would resign following a damning report on the affair).
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| Then and now: Ratko Mladic will stand trial for a litany of war crimes |
The following day, the Serbs began to separate the women from their menfolk. Mladic was caught on film blithely telling some refugees: 'All who wish to go will be transported, large and small, young and old. Don't be afraid, just take it easy. Let the women and children go first ... No one will harm you.'
But a surviving witness claimed that the general then qualified this offer, saying that the men would be killed and thrown into the nearby Drina river to feed the fish. The women would be spared only that they could suffer the knowledge of what had happened to their men.
Tens of thousands of females and very young or old males were put on buses and allowed to leave for Bosnian Muslim territory. But all males between the ages of puberty and the mid seventies were rounded up. Their fate had been sealed.
Over the next five days, the Muslim males perished in mass executions which took place on farms, in social centres and warehouses, along river banks and in forests.
Guns, rocket propelled grenades, knives and axes were used.
One Serb soldier present at a massacre at Branjevo Farm recalled executions lasting from 10 a.m. to mid-afternoon. One of his comrades boasted of killing between 200 to 300 men by himself. It was reminiscent of the Nazi Holocaust. In an attempt to hide the atrocity, the bodies disappeared into mass graves. But no crime that large could be camouflaged.
That same year Mladic was indicted by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges detailed his responsibility for Srebrenica as well as crimes committed during the Sarajevo siege, including the deliberate targeting of civilians by snipers.
And yet he continued to live quite freely and in some comfort in Belgrade under the patronage of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. It was not until Milosevic fell in 2001 and democrats came to power that Mladic disappeared. Milosevic was to die in custody in the Hague in 2006. Other regime comrades-in-arms gave themselves up or were captured and tried. Some, like Karadzic, remained at large until relatively recently.
But Mladic seemed to lead a charmed existence, despite the millions of pounds reward money on his head and periodic ill health.
While at large he came to embody the fracture between the old Serbia and the new, a haunting drag on his country's rehabilitation.
After all, his arrest and extradition was a condition of Serbia's entry into the EU -- a prospect that now looks much more likely following Thursday's events. To show willing, the Serbian government set up special units to find Mladic. But he had widespread support inside the country and a poll in March showed that more than half of the respondents opposed his extradition. Forty per cent described him as a 'hero'.
There has been much suspicion that elements within the intelligence services, military or among powerful sympathisers protected Mladic until his arrest on Thursday in a cousin's house. He was not even wearing any disguise but had merely 'aged considerably'. Such doubts are hardly allayed by the admission that the Bosnian Serb army had been paying him his pension until 2006. And his close family, who had tried to get him declared legally dead last year, professed themselves delighted at the news that he was in fact alive.
So much for the masquerade. The graves of Srebenica have given up most, but not all of their dead.And, with the capture of the man in charge, the final act of that tragedy can now begin.
Serb court says Mladic fit for genocide trial
BELGRADE, May 27 (Reuters) - Ratko Mladic is fit enough to face genocide charges in The Hague, a Belgrade court ruled on Friday, after the Bosnian Serb wartime general's son said he appeared too frail after more than 15 years on the run.
The court said Mladic, arrested on Thursday in a Serbian village, had until Monday to appeal against extradition to the international criminal court to be tried over a massacre in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo during Bosnia's 1992-5 war.
European officials hailed his capture, at a farmhouse belonging to his cousin, as a milestone on Serbia's path towards the European Union and said they expected his extradition within 10 days. His son, speaking after what he said was his first meeting with his father in years, said he was too ill.
"We are almost certain he cannot be extradited in such condition," said Darko Mladic. "He is in very bad shape. His right arm is half paralysed. His right side is partly numb." The once burly and aggressive Mladic, 69, moved slowly and with a slight limp when he appeared before an investigative judge at the special war crimes court in Belgrade on Thursday.
Mladic's lawyer later told reporters the court had halted the questioning because his client was "in a serious condition. He is hardly responsive". An official described him as looking disoriented and tired.
"Dead man arrested," ran several Serbian newspaper headlines on Friday, with a picture showing a pale and wizened Mladic, the last of the three men accused of instigating ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia to be held accountable.
Officials say Mladic has high blood pressure, heart disease and a kidney stone and his son said he had suffered strokes which had left two scars on his brain, although he said his father recognised the family and knew he was in detention.
Judge Maja Kovacevic said the medical team had determined that he was fit for further proceedings. "Mladic's lawyer was delivered the extradition papers and he has until Monday to appeal," she said.
Mladic's lawyer Milos Saljic said he would appeal against the extradition on Monday and insisted that Mladic could not be handed over to The Hague until his health was stable.
"He must be provided with adequate treatment before the extradition," he told reporters.
Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian minister in charge of the search for fugitive war criminals, said Mladic, often quoted declaring, "The Hague will not see me alive!" had not resisted arrest.
"Mladic had two loaded guns he did not use," Ljajic said. "Mladic was dressed in several layers of clothes, he was hardly recognisable, he was not attracting attention. He looked pale as if he hadn't left confined spaces for a very long time," he said on Serbian television.
The deputy war crimes prosecutor said the court would continue to question the general, accused of orchestrating the brutal 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said she expected Mladic to be extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague within nine or 10 days. Mladic, whose Bosnian Serb Army was armed and funded by the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, is still seen as a hero by many Serbs. Milosevic died in 2006 while on trial in The Hague for war crimes.
Nationalists in Serbia, which was under international sanctions over the war in Bosnia and then bombed by NATO to stop atrocities in Kosovo in 1999, condemned the arrest as a blow to national interests.
© Daily Mail, London |
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