Former Bosnian Serb military chief was serving a life sentence handed down at The Hague
BELGRADE: Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military chief convicted of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, has died, Serbian state broadcaster RTS reported Thursday. Mladic, who had suffered several strokes in recent months, was serving a life sentence at The Hague for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Serbian state officials and Mladic’s family had appealed for his release on health grounds, but those calls were rejected by the Hague tribunal. His defense team had argued that “given the nature of the terminal and uncurable medical condition of Mr Mladic and his short-term life expectancy, continued detention serves no legitimate purpose, and approaches inhuman treatment and punishment”.
Mladic was the military face of a trio led on the political side by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, as the former Yugoslavia descended into war after the fall of communism. The 1992-1995 conflict left around 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million displaced.
The most infamous atrocity was committed in Srebrenica, where Serb forces under Mladic’s command executed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who had sought shelter in what was meant to be a UN-protected enclave. Footage from the time showed him handing out sweets to children before they and the women of Srebrenica were taken away by bus, while the men were marched into a forest and killed. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves, many of which were later dug up and reburied to hide the evidence.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Mladic in November 1995. He was dismissed from his post but evaded capture for another 16 years, at first living in comfort under military protection in Serbia, where some still regard him as a hero. Pressure mounted after Milosevic fell from power in 2000, and Mladic was arrested in May 2011 and transferred to The Hague.
He insisted throughout his trial and appeal that he was not guilty, describing the court as a “child of western powers” and himself as the “target of the NATO alliance”. He was convicted in 2017 and the life sentence was upheld on appeal in 2021, with judges also finding him guilty of a wider campaign of ethnic cleansing. The tribunal said the crimes were “amongst the most heinous known to humankind”, while former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein called him “the epitome of evil”. His age was disputed: he claimed to have been born in March 1943, but the tribunal listed his birth year as 1942. — AFP