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Ratko Mladic Is Convicted in 1990s Slaughter of Bosnian Muslims
Mladic Conviction Closes Dark Chapter in Europe, but New Era of Uncertainty Looms
(about 3 hours later)
THE HAGUE — A United Nations tribunal convicted Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb former general, on Wednesday of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims during the breakup of Yugoslavia. He was sentenced to life in prison.
THE HAGUE — It was perhaps the closing of Europe’s most shameful chapter of atrocity and bloodletting since World War II.
With outbursts inside and outside the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It was the last major item of business for the tribunal in The Hague before it wound down, a full quarter-century after some of the crimes it prosecuted were committed.
From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found, Mr. Mladic, 75, was the chief military organizer of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs off their lands to cleave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.
From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found, Mr. Mladic, 75, was the chief military organizer of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs off their lands to cleave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.
Along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, who was convicted on similar charges last year, Mr. Mladic was found to have orchestrated a campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing that made Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation of 4.5 million at the time, the site of some of the worst atrocities of Europe’s bloody 20th century.
The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mr. Mladic’s forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica.
The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mr. Mladic’s forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica.
Sitting impassively at first in the court in a blue suit and tie, Mr. Mladic seemed much smaller than the burly man who had appeared occasionally in fatigues to defend himself and his forces during the conflict.
Survivors called Mr. Mladic the Butcher of Bosnia. His defense lawyers argued that Mr. Mladic was largely following orders from politicians above him, and that any atrocities committed by his subordinates and militias were not done at his direction.
At one point, Mr. Mladic disappeared from the court, apparently to receive treatment for high blood pressure. Upon returning, he began shouting at the court in a dispute over his blood pressure.
Prosecutors asked for a life sentence for Mr. Mladic. The presiding judge, Alphons Orie, agreed, saying that his crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind.” Mr. Mladic’s lawyers said they would appeal.
“You are lying, you are lying, you are lying,” he yelled. He was then ordered to be removed.
Surprising many observers, Mr. Mladic appeared in court on Wednesday, wearing a dark suit and a red tie, as the three-judge panel handed down its ruling.
In pronouncing the life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said that Mr. Mladic’s crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind.” Mr. Mladic’s lawyers said they would appeal.
He sat impassively for the first 45 minutes of the judge’s address. But after his lawyers requested a five-minute break to allow him to go to the bathroom, Mr. Mladic did not reappear for almost an hour. Reporters were told he was having his blood pressure checked.
But if Mr. Mladic’s punishment drew a line of sorts — juridically at least — it was a halting and ambivalent marker between Europe’s epochs of uncertainty.
When he returned, he began shouting at the court in a dispute over his blood pressure. “You are lying, you are lying, you are lying,” Mr. Mladic said to the judge. “I don’t feel good.”
Far from the quieted theaters of Balkan conflict, nationalist passions, the clamor for redrawn frontiers and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.
The judge ordered his removal, and guards grabbed him by both arms to take him out. Mr. Mladic was able to watch the rest of the proceedings on a screen elsewhere in the courthouse.
In October, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the right, following Hungary and Poland. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time. In many lands there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain’s planned departure from the European Union.
The verdict reverberated throughout the court building in The Hague — where dozens of survivors of the bloodshed, many of them widows or refugees, filled the public gallery, while others watched from monitors set up by the tribunal or followed it online — and across Europe. In Sarajevo, people watched in cafes and public areas, but there was little overt celebration.
Some of those passions are drawn from the angry response among Germans and other Europeans to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s readiness to open Germany’s frontiers to hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and elsewhere — many of whom passed through Serbia on their way north.
The United Nations human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, welcomed Mr. Mladic’s conviction as “a momentous victory for justice” that served notice to perpetrators of crimes, however powerful, that they would not escape justice.
In Britain, many who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union did so, they said, out of resentment of outsiders’ influence over their destinies and the presence of what they saw as unchecked European immigrants.
“Mladic is the epitome of evil,” Mr. al-Hussein said in a statement issued by his office in Geneva minutes after the judge pronounced the sentence.
In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade — and not a few convicted war criminals — are reclaiming positions of prominence.
The reaction in Serbia, where nationalism is rising once again, was more muted. Although no Serbian government has ever acknowledged that Srebrenica was genocide, the country has accepted the proceedings over the massacres to help pave the way for talks on eventually joining the European Union.
There is a sense, too, of unfinished business and resentments that the war did not heal. Indeed, the trials of Mr. Mladic and others, including his political mentor Radovan Karadzic, who was jailed for 40 years on almost identical charges last year, may simply have intensified Serbia’s rancorous perceptions of being treated unfairly and Muslims’ sense of loss.
“I know tempers are boiling in the region,” Aleksandar Vucic, the country’s president, told reporters. He urged Serbs to “not drown in the tears from past times” and to focus instead on building the country and encouraging economic growth.
“Regardless of the verdict that we all feel is part of the campaign against Serbs, Ratko Mladic remains a legend of the Serb nation,” said Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb autonomous region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was carved out and cleansed of non-Serbs by Mr. Mladic’s wartime forces.
The result was hardly in doubt, given the volume of evidence produced during the trial, which began in 2012.
Speaking for the Muslim side, Sead Numanovic, a Bosnian journalist in Sarajevo who fought against Mr. Mladic’s forces, said, “This verdict, like all the others, will not bring back sons to their mothers, dead brothers to their sisters and husbands to their wives.”
But citing his fragile health, Mr. Mladic’s lawyers had urged that the verdict be postponed. Judges rejected those arguments — mindful, perhaps, of the case of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president who died in a prison cell in 2006 as his four-year trial was drawing to a close.
The sense of victimhood among Serbs seemed to have been trumped on Wednesday by the sentencing of Mr. Mladic, which all but confirmed Bosnian Muslim resentments that the Serbs had succeeded in advancing their territorial ambitions by genocide.
Mr. Mladic’s case was the last major trial handled by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which the United Nations established in 1993 in response to the atrocities. After one final appellate ruling, expected this month, the tribunal will close its doors; a small successor court will deal with pending appeals and the retrial of two former intelligence chiefs from Serbia.
“This should all have been behind us by now,” said Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. “The only thing that is behind us is that war.”
To varying degrees, Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims (also known as Bosniaks) all committed atrocities during the 1991-95 violence that ensued after Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia voted for independence from Yugoslavia.
On both sides of the enduring ethnic divide, there was a feeling that the pronouncements of robed judges at The Hague will have no perceptible impact on the practicalities of eking out an existence in straitened times.
A number of Croats and Bosniaks were convicted by the tribunal. But the majority of trials involved Bosnian Serbs, because crimes in the name of Serbian interests and extreme nationalism were committed on a far greater scale. Of the 130,000 people killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, 100,000 died in Bosnia.
Bosnians in Sarajevo who once ran from snipers’ bullets and sheltered from incessant indiscriminate shelling by Mr. Mladic’s artillery units in the hills above the city have traded those perils for a dysfunctional government, joblessness and a collapsed social security and health system. (At The Hague on Wednesday, Judge Orie said Mr. Mladic had personally directed some of that deadly fire.)
Along with Mr. Mladic, the other two men seen as among the main instigators of the bloodshed were Mr. Milosevic, who provided the Bosnian Serb separatists with funding, weapons and military personnel, and Mr. Karadzic, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
In Belgrade, the crumbling socialist-era grandeur harks back to better times, when the city was the capital of a moderately developed Yugoslavia with a population of 22 million, rather than the impoverished republic it is today, among Europe’s poorest.
If Mr. Karadzic was the brains behind the ethnic cleansing operations, Mr. Mladic was the muscle, leading a proxy army largely financed, armed and staffed at the top by Serbia. The pair were among the first to be indicted, but spent years on the run.
Coupled with that struggle is a lingering memory not just of the war in Bosnia and Croatia of the early 1990s but also of the fighting later in the decade in what was then the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. To this day, banners in front of the Parliament building hold Bill and Hillary Clinton responsible for the widely resented 78-day NATO campaign that drove Serb-dominated forces out of Kosovo, enabling it to eventually declare independence in 2008.
While Mr. Karadzic used elaborate disguises, Mr. Mladic was long shielded by the Serbian military, which paid his salary and to this day still pays him a pension. At first he resided at military sites and retreats in Serbia, but eventually went underground, protected by loyalist followers.
Against that dim backdrop, Serbia is hoping to become the next member state of the European Union, although that would be in 2025 at the earliest.
He was tracked down in May 2011 at his cousin’s farm, north of Belgrade, after a concerted campaign to isolate him and reduce his financial support.
Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilized world.”
Mr. Mladic left a compelling trail, recording his meetings and telephone conversations with military officials, politicians or foreign envoys. They were discovered behind a false wall in Mr. Mladic’s home; included in that cache were 18 notebooks representing his wartime diaries, an extraordinary windfall, prosecutors said.
“Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion,” Ms. Kandic said.
Mr. Mladic, whose handwriting was authenticated, listed meetings, including numerous times with the Serbian president, topics of discussion, strategy laid out, orders for ammunition and troop movements. In one telling entry on May 7, 1992, Mr. Mladic wrote that the Bosnian Serb leadership had discussed six strategic goals, of which the first and most important was “to separate from the Croats and Muslims forever.”
None of the 3,500 pages directly showed his own hand in crimes and few entries exist, or survive, from the days of the Srebrenica massacre. But many entries were used in various prosecutions, including Mr. Mladic’s, providing the kind of firsthand, dot-connecting accounts needed to prove a criminal case.
It was also the first trial in which prosecutors presented evidence from recently explored mass graves around an open-pit mine at Tomasica near Prijedor in Northern Bosnia.
They proved to be a dumping ground for Bosniaks killed or starved to death during the ethnic cleansing campaign around Prijedor, where the police operated concentration camps that became notorious for torture and rape.
The International Commission on Missing Persons, which uses DNA testing, said this month that so far 656 bodies from the mine have been identified, most of them men, all of them in civilian clothes. Those identified were among the nearly 6,000 people reported missing around Prijedor in the summer of 1992.
But more bodies are emerging, including remains that were moved to other graves to hide the magnitude of the crime.
Mr. Mladic’s diary notes a request in 1992 from Simo Drljaca, the Prijedor police chief, asking for the army’s help to remove about 5,000 bodies buried in Tomasica by “burning them or grinding them or in any other way.”
Mr. Mladic wrote that he replied, “You killed them, you bury them.”
At the height of the ethnic cleansing campaign, in 1992, close to 45,000 were killed or missing, almost half of the 100,000 who died in the Bosnian war. That year, the number of Bosnian refugees and internally displaced persons reached 2.6 million.
In court Mr. Mladic was unpredictable, veering between indifference and angry outbursts, charming or mocking his judges, shouting orders at his lawyers because he can barely write notes after suffering strokes.
He called the charges against him “monstrous” and said he was “defending Serbia and the Serbian people, not Ratko Mladic.”
But his failing health has been a continuing problem. Pressed by the judges, the prosecution cut back about 40 percent of the crimes cited in an earlier indictment.
Doctors said he had suffered two strokes before arriving in The Hague, and since then he has suffered from high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney stones and other ailments. Several crises, including what is presumed to have been a heart attack, forced a pause in the proceedings and a reduction of weekly sessions to four days instead of five.
Defense lawyers repeatedly warned that his health had deteriorated, and just this month prosecutors privately expressed worry that he might not live until the verdict or would be unable to attend.
