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BarcelonaThe Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, architect of the bloodiest massacres of the Bosnian War, died this Thursday at the age of 83, while serving a life sentence in a United Nations detention center in The Hague, as confirmed by the Serbian government. Known by the nickname Butcher of Bosnia, he had been convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which held him militarily responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of Srebrenica, in which more than 10,000 and 8,000 civilians died, respectively.
Mladić, raised in a small village south of Sarajevo and in a nationalist environment – a Croatian nationalist faction murdered his father when he was two years old – enlisted in the Yugoslav army at just fifteen years old. Thanks to his battlefield successes, he gradually rose through the military ranks, and in 1992, when Bosnia declared its independence, he took command of the army in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where he ordered what became the longest siege in contemporary history. His troops terrorized the population with bombs and snipers for more than four years, during which the city was completely blockaded.
He led the ethnic cleansing campaign of the Bosnian Serb troops, who invaded 70% of the country at the start of the war. Dozens of villages were razed and burned, while 22,000 UN Protection Force soldiers stood by, uninvolved in the conflict. The culminating episode was the Srebrenica massacre, during which he assured the blue helmets that he would protect the nearly 10,000 refugees who were in that “safe zone,” but he ordered all the men to be killed.
After the conflict and the fall of his political allies, Mladić went into hiding to avoid being tried in The Hague and, thanks to an extensive network of protection and complicity in Serbia, he remained a fugitive for sixteen years. Once he was arrested in 2011, a trial began that lasted more than six years due to the large volume of evidence and testimonies and the gravity of the charges. When the judges issued the historic verdict declaring him guilty in 2017, they determined that his crimes “are among the most heinous known to humanity.”
Distorted legacy
The cruelty of his methods has transcended him. Beyond the crimes for which he was convicted, it is explained that Mladic had a cameraman film the bombing of the Srebrenica enclave to boast about it to his men, or that he killed the men of an entire prisoner camp by thirst by giving them salt and preventing them from drinking water in the middle of summer.
Despite being the architect of the war crimes perpetrated by the Bosnian Serb troops in the nineties, Mladic is still considered a war hero and defender of Greater Serbia by some sectors in both Serbia and Republika Srpska, the Serb region of Bosnia. Until the last moment he defended his actions: “I defended my people and only my people can judge me,” he defiantly declared the day the International Criminal Tribunal read the sentence that condemned him to life imprisonment.