The Hague ratifies the life sentence for Ratko Mladic, the "butcher of the Balkans", for war crimes and genocide

He was one of the key figures in the Bosnian War as commander of the Serb Army and more than earned the nickname “the butcher of Srebrenica” for ordering one of the most traumatic genocides in human history.. For others, Ratko Mladic is a great national hero at 79 years old. And for international Justice, he is a war criminal who deserves life imprisonment. He has already spent a decade in jail in The Hague and still has the rest of his life, after the court has confirmed the ruling on appeal.

With Radovan Karadzic as the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Mladic became the face of ruthless ethnic cleansing and massacres in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.. As Chief of the Army General Staff of the Republika Srpska, Mladic was responsible, among other things, for the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, killing 11,000 people, and for the capture of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, where some 8,000 men were executed. and thousands of women and children were deported to the outskirts of the enclave. They involved acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty of 10 of the 11 charges against him and was only acquitted of the crime of genocide in a few Bosnian townships.. His entire appeal was rejected.

In the summer of 1995, six months before the agreement that ended the war in Bosnia, Mladic was charged by the Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with alleged genocide and crimes against humanity.. Despite the international arrest warrant, the 5 million dollars that had been offered for his head and the active search by NATO, Mladic escaped the bars of the Justice of The Hague for 16 years.. Rumors then spread that he was living in Belgrade, hiding in military bases and protected by the Bosnian Serb Army and its government.

Architect of the Srebrenica massacre

In the spring of 2011, a unit of Serbian forces arrested him at the home of a cousin of his and handed him over to international justice.. Three years earlier, his accomplice Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade.. Mladic, responsible for the worst war crimes in Europe since World War II, had been helped by his family for years.. He hid in the village of Lazarevo, north of Belgrade.. European pressure on Serbia, which wanted to achieve membership in the European Union, then sentenced the fate of both, who were sent to The Hague to face their past.

After years of trial, hundreds of sessions, delays, surprises and even the live suicide of one of his cell colleagues, ICTY concluded at the end of 2017 that Mladic is guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the law of war.. He engineered the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, besieging all who took refuge there and seeking to create “unbearable conditions” in which civilians “have no hope of getting out alive.”

In the end, it was ruled that in their hands is the blood of those murdered in Srebrenica, as well as the fate of those who were deported and separated from their parents and siblings.. He is also guilty of the kidnapping of several UN blue helmets who were trying to “monitor” peace in the area, young Dutchmen who failed in their mission to protect Muslim civilians.. Mladic wanted those Dutch soldiers as hostages to avoid aerial bombardments by NATO forces, and he succeeded.

He never apologized to the victims

The ICTY judges confirmed that Mladic was also directly responsible for the bombing of Sarajevo: he besieged the city and “personally” ordered the attack on the city. His team of lawyers always defended that the Srebrenica massacre was committed by “insane” militiamen and soldiers and Mladic was “one more professional soldier” in that war. “They are lies, this is a shame,” he snapped at the judge who sentenced him to life imprisonment in 2017, a sentence that both Mladic and the ICTY prosecutors appealed.. The latter considered that the former general is also guilty of “genocide” in other regions, and not only in Srebrenica.

Mladic's appeal sentence was handed down by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals because the ICTY already closed its doors in 2018, after convicting 90 people for what happened in the 1990s. Karadzic will serve his sentence in a British prison, and it remains to be seen where Mladic will spend the rest of his life.

After knowing the sentence, the chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz has indicated that “Mladic is part of the list of the most depraved and barbaric figures in history” because “he intentionally used his military command to attack, kill, torture, rape and expel civilians innocent for no other reason than because of their ethnicity and religion”. With his life sentence, “the time has come to accept the truth,” he adds.

The victims have for Mladic the maximum sentence they could achieve in The Hague, but not the apology of their executioner. “He never showed any remorse or empathy towards them,” Brammertz said during the court proceedings.. Mladic had 167 witnesses to what happened. He never asked for forgiveness, although there are those who never lose hope that one day he will pronounce the word “forgiveness” before dying. Mladic, for the moment, exhausted all avenues for Justice to declare him innocent. The case is already closed.