Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in the Hague, a UN official and his lawyer confirmed. Mladić, 84, had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.
Mladić, who was nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, had been in ill after having a series of strokes. Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction, Mladić was one of the most notorious figures of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless. He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslim people and had boasted of being a “Serbian god”.
The news of Mladić’s death was first broken on Serbian state television after his son Darko had spoken earlier about his father’s declining health. Mladić was sentenced by a UN tribunal to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1990s war. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run.
The slaughter in Srebrenica was the culmination of a brutal war that had lasted more than three years, during which Mladić oversaw the siege of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, which was pounded daily by artillery, tank, and sniper fire, killing 10,000 people. The goal of the Serbian leadership, which Mladić was tasked with implementing – as determined by the UN’s international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – was the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for the creation of a greater Serbia. The tribunal found that Mladić, together with late Serbian president Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
When he was sentenced, he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!” The Serbian campaign culminated in the horror of Srebrenica when, after the withdrawal of Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. Mladić had the siege filmed to show him praising his “lads” and haranguing the UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. The next day, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage.
Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for slaughter. When Nato tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets. The son of a second world war partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladić was an officer in the communist Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in 1991.
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