‘Butcher of Bosnia’ Ratko Mladic dies at 83

Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a U.N.-designated "safe area" of Bosnia, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, has died, a U.N. official said on Thursday.

The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000.

The ​dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.

The goal, as ‌determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was "ethnic cleansing" — the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.

The tribunal found that Mladic, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.

"I do not recognise this court," Mladic, dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia" by his opponents, said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 he shouted: "This is ​all lies, you are all liars!"

According to his son, documents gave Mladic's date of birth at March 12, 1942, but he was actually born on March 8, 1943.


'GERMANS HAD HITLER, SERBS HAVE MLADIC'

Karadzic, also convicted of genocide in ​2016, and Mladic topped the ICTY wanted list for years after Western powers ended the war. But until Milosevic was toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived securely - ⁠if discreetly - in Belgrade.

Milosevic died in detention on March 11, 2006, a few months before a verdict in his four-year tribunal trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was ​a model of ruthlessness, daring and brutality in the Serb warrior tradition, once prized in the life-or-death partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.

In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being ​forced to eat salt and denied water; were starved and raped in prison camps; were made to jump off a bridge and shot; and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas.

"For me Mladic is a symbol of all horrible crimes that happened during the war - our girls were raped, and boys killed, only because they were Muslim," said Munira Subasic, whose son and husband were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran Srebrenica.

"Germans had Hitler, Serbs have Mladic," Subasic continued. "There is no difference ​between the two."
Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, to show him extolling his "lads" and haranguing Dutch U.N. peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. Srebrenica ​supposedly had "safe area" status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.

-Reuters