UN Tribunal Convicts the 'Butcher of Bosnia' of Genocide

Ratko Mladic, the former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by a UN tribunal. 

Experts argue that Mladic’s conviction is a welcome sign in cases related to genocide. But the international legal institution needs to be further strengthened to deal with such cases of crimes against humanity. 

Mladic led the forces during the massacre of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted him on 10 of the 11 charges. The tribunal was created especially to try war crimes committed during the Yugoslav conflicts that tore up the Balkans in the 1990's.

The Bosnian genocide began in spring 1992 when Bosnian-Serbian nationalists, led by Radovan Karadzic, started taking over units and weapons from the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav national army and launched their violent campaign against the non-Serb (primarily Muslim and Croat) populations. It was backed by Milosevic (who was the then president of Serbia), and supported by murderous Milosevic-funded militia from Serbia proper. 

The Serbian forces burned villages, killed community leaders, incarcerated and murdered men in concentration camps, and raped women and girls - thus terrorising 90% of the non-Serb population into leaving the areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina that they controlled or conquered.

The tribunal found that Mladic "significantly contributed" to the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, where more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered, the worst atrocity in Europe after World War II, the Guardian reported.

He was also deemed responsible by the chamber for inciting terror during the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-96) -- where Serb troops had carried out a campaign of indiscriminate sniper fire against civilians. The death toll was more than 10,000.

"The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to humankind and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity," presiding judge Alphons Orie said while reading the verdict.

Orie read out many crimes committed by troops under Mladic's command, including mass rapes of Bosniak women and girls, keeping Bosniak prisoners in appalling conditions and beating them, terrorising civilians in Sarajevo by shelling and sniping, deporting Bosniaks forcibly en masse and destroying Bosniaks' homes as well as mosques.

The chamber rejected mitigating circumstances proposed by the defence team and handed Mladic a life sentence, bringing to a close a four-year landmark trial at the UN International Criminal Tribunal.

The chamber detailed that during the massacre of Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb troops separated men and boys from women being loaded onto buses to evacuate the Muslim population from the enclave. 

The verdict comes a year after former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžic was found guilty of genocide over the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica and sentenced to 40 years in jail.

The ‘ethnic cleansing’ was part of the Bosnian Serb military “Directive 7” ordering the “permanent removal” of Bosnian Muslims from the safe areas. And according to the recent declassified document, the western powers were aware of this. 

The Dutch soldiers, part of the UN force (UNPROFOR) were blamed to have failed in their duty to protect Srebrenica.  They had evicted terrified civilians seeking shelter in their headquarters, and watched the Serbs separate women and young children from their male family members, according to reports.

Ed Vulliamy, a British-Irish journalist and writer looking the silence of the west, notes:

“Mass of evidence documenting the siege suggests much wider involvement in the events leading to the fall of Srebrenica. Declassified cables, exclusive interviews and testimony to the tribunal show that the British, American and French governments accepted – and sometimes argued – that Srebrenica and two other UN-protected safe areas were “untenable” long before Mladic took the town, and were ready to cede Srebrenica to the Serbs in pursuit of a map acceptable to the Serbian president, Slobodan Miloševic, for peace at any price.”

Further reports suggested as the top western negotiators met Mladic and Miloševic, the killings had begun. But the negotiators did not raise the issue of mass murder, even though unclassified US cables show that the CIA was watching the killing fields almost “live” from satellite planes.

(with inputs from IANS)