12/18/2017 Bosnian Serb warlord Ratko Mladić disrupts genocide verdict hearing | World news | The Guardian

Bosnian Serb warlord Ratko Mladić disrupts genocide verdict hearing

Mladic dragged out of court after shouting outburst
Julian Borger World affairs editor
Wednesday 22 November 2017 05.45 EST

Ratko Mladić, the Serb warlord who terrorised Bosnia in the 1990s, was on Wednesday forcibly removed from court after a shouting outburst delayed the reading of the
verdict in his trial for the last genocide committed in Europe.

The long-anticipated verdict was previously delayed for half an hour after Mladic asked the judge if he could take a short bathroom break.

The delay was extended as rumours began to circulate that the former Bosnian Serb commander, who had appeared healthy when sitting in court, had suddenly been
taken ill.

As he entered the ICTY courtroom, Mladic had infuriated relatives of the victims as gave a broad smile and gave a thumbs up to the cameras.

Mladić, who was commander of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992-95 Bosnian conflict and for several years was one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, is now 74
and in poor health. His lawyers have argued he is not well enough to hear his verdict and sentence in person, but it is not clear whether they will seek a last-minute
postponement. A judge has already rejected a defence effort earlier this month to have the judgment put off.

The trial in The Hague, which took 530 days spread over more than four years, is arguably the most significant war crimes case in Europe since the Nuremberg tribunal,
in part because of the scale of the atrocities involved. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) heard from 591 witnesses and examined
nearly 10,000 exhibits concerning 106 separate crimes.

Legal scholars say Mladić is almost certain to be found guilty of genocide for the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, where more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were
killed, most by summary execution. The Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadžić, was convicted of genocide last year for his role in the Srebrenica killings.
Mladić was shown on video giving orders to his troops as the army-age men and teenage boys were separated from their families, shortly before the executions began.

“He is definitely the personification of evil for many, many survivors and victims and that’s why this trial is so important – because it gives a certain sense of justice to
people who have been have waiting for this moment for many years,” Serge Brammertz, the ICTY chief prosecutor, told the Guardian, on the eve of the verdict.

Brammertz oversaw the successful hunt for Mladić during the general’s last years in hiding and then his marathon prosecution.

He said: “The Mladić case has definitely been one of the most important cases at this tribunal. He was been on the run for many years, and I remember when I started in
2008, everyone was quite pessimistic about the chances of getting Mladić ever arrested.”

A Bosnian woman offers prayers at the Potocari memorial near Srebrenica. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty
Images

The Bosnian Serb military leader was first indicted in 1995 but the Nato allies who sent peacekeepers to Bosnia after the war initially had little interest in arresting him,
fearing it could only be achieved with a major battle and significant bloodshed.

After UK, US, French and German special forces stepped up their efforts to hunt war criminals in 1997, Mladić went into hiding, eventually withdrawing to Serbia, where
he was sheltered by the army.

Brammertz said it was European solidarity in demanding Serbia hand over war crimes suspects on the ICTY list before Belgrade could even begin talking about financial
aid and eventual EU membership, that eventually led to his arrest. He was found by Serbian police, living in squalor in May 2011, in a cousin’s village home near the
border with Romania.

The Mladić trial is the last major case to be heard by the tribunal, an ad hoc experiment in justice established by the UN security council, that is now winding down.

In Bosnia, the verdict will be closely watched to see if Mladić is found guilty of genocide on another count, concerning mass killings elsewhere in Bosnia outside
Srebrenica, particularly in Prijedor, where Bosnian Serb forces ran horrific prison camps and murdered thousands of Muslims and Croats.

Karadžić was found guilty of crimes against humanity for mass murder in locations apart from Srebrenica, but not for genocide, which caused outrage among Bosniaks
(Bosnian Muslims) who have been seeking acknowledgment from the tribunal that genocide was committed across the country.

There was also fury that Karadžić was sentenced to 40 years rather than life imprisonment. Any sentence less than life for Mladić is likely to trigger protests from
survivors and victims’ families.

In Serbia and the Serb-run half of Bosnia, the ICTY trials have done little to change the minds among nationalists, who still see Mladić as a war hero and increasingly
deny Serb responsibility for the mass murders of the Bosnian war.

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12/18/2017 Ratko Mladić convicted of war crimes and genocide at UN tribunal | World news | The Guardian

Ratko Mladić convicted of war crimes and genocide at UN tribunal

Former Bosnian Serb army commander sentenced to life imprisonment more than 20 years after Srebrenica massacre

Owen Bowcott and Julian Borger

Wednesday 22 November 2017 06.00 EST

The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after
being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.

As he entered the courtroom, Mladić gave a broad smile and thumbs up to the cameras – a gesture that infuriated relatives of the
victims. His defiance shifted into detachment as the judgment began: Mladić played with his fingers and nodded occasionally, looking
initially relaxed.

The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defence
lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić
then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were
read in his absence.

Mladić, 74, was chief of staff of Bosnian Serb forces from 1992 until 1996, during the ferocious civil wars and ethnic cleansing that
followed the break-up of the Yugoslav state.

The one-time fugitive from international justice faced 11 charges, two of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of
violations of the laws or customs of war. He was cleared of one count of genocide, but found guilty of all other charges. The separate
counts related to “ethnic cleansing” operations in Bosnia, sniping and shelling attacks on besieged civilians in Sarajevo, the massacre of
Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and taking UN personnel hostage in an attempt to deter Nato airstrikes.

The trial in The Hague, which took 530 days across more than four years, is arguably the most significant war crimes case in Europe
since the Nuremberg trials, in part because of the scale of the atrocities involved. Almost 600 people gave evidence for the prosecution
and defence, including survivors of the conflict.

Delivering the verdicts, judge Alphons Orie said Mladić’s crimes “rank among the most heinous known to humankind and include
genocide and extermination”.

Orie dismissed mitigation pleas by the defence that Mladić was of “good character”, had diminished mental capacity and was in poor
physical health.

Relatives of victims flew into the Netherlands to attend the hearing, determined to see Mladić receive justice decades after the end of
the war in which more than 100,000 people were killed.

Among those present was Fikret Alić, the Bosnian who was photographed as an emaciated prisoner behind the wire of a prison camp in
1992. “Justice has won and the war criminal has been convicted,” he said after the verdict. Others were reduced to tears by the judge’s
description of past atrocities.

Fikret Alić holds a copy of Time magazine that featured his emaciated image on its cover in
1992. Photograph: Phil Nijhuis/AP

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12/18/2017 Ratko Mladić convicted of war crimes and genocide at UN tribunal | World news | The Guardian
Mladić was one of the world’s most wanted fugitives before his arrest in 2011 in northern Serbia. He was transferred to the ICTY in the
Netherlands, where he refused to enter a plea. A not guilty plea was eventually entered on his behalf. Through much of the trial in The
Hague, he was a disruptive presence in court, heckling judges and on one occasion making a cut-throat gesture towards the mother of
one of the 8,000 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Mladić was acquitted of only one charge, that of genocide in Bosnian municipalities outside Srebrenica. The chamber ruled that
although he was part of a joint criminal enterprise to carry out mass killings there, which represented crimes against humanity, they did
not rise to the level of genocide because the victims did not represent a substantial proportion of the Bosnian Muslim population of
those municipalities.

The Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadžić, was also found not guilty of genocide in the municipalities. That tribunal verdict
in 2016 triggered protests from Bosniaks, who wanted the court to acknowledge that genocide was committed across Bosnia, not just in
Srebrenica.

In evaluating Mladić’s culpability for genocide, the court pointed to his command and control of the Bosnian Serb army and interior
ministry forces, which carried out almost all of the killings, his presence in the area, and his frequent remarks about how the country’s
Muslims could “disappear”.

Orie said: “The chamber found that the only reasonable inference was that the accused intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim of
Srebrenica as a substantial part of the protected group of Muslims in Bosnia Herzegovina.

“Accordingly, the chamber found the accused intended to carry out the Srebrenica joint criminal enterprises through the commission of
the crime of genocide and was a member of the Srebrenica joint criminal enterprise.”

Once Mladic has exhausted any appeals, he could, theoretically, be sent to the UK to serve out the rest of his life behind bars. Britain is
one of the countries that has signed up to the tribunal’s agreement on the enforcement of sentences.

The UK has hosted other Serbian convicts sent on from the ICTY. In 2010, Radislav Krstić who was convicted at the Hague in 2001 for
his part in the Srebrenica massacre, had his throat slashed in his cell at Wakefield prison by three Muslim inmates intent on revenge.

The former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor is also serving out his 50 year prison term in a UK jail.

Mladic will remain in the UN detention centre at Scheveningen, near the Hague, in the meantime. Any appeal will be dealt with by the
successor court, the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals.

The hearing, broadcast live, was followed closely in Bosnia. The Bosnian prime minister, Denis Zvizdić, said the verdict “confirmed that
war criminals cannot escape justice regardless of how long they hide”.

In Lazarevo, the Serbian village where Mladić was arrested in 2011, residents dismissed the guilty verdicts as biased. One, Igor Topolic,
said: “All this is a farce for me. He [Mladić] is a Serbian national hero.”

Mladić’s home village of Bozinovici retains a street named after the former general, where he is praised as a symbol of defiance and
national pride.

The trial is one of the last to be heard by the ICTY, which is to be dissolved at the end of the year.

People, including victims, protest in front of the international criminal tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) prior to the verdict Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

After the ruling, Serge Brammertz, the ICTY’s chief prosecutor, said it was not a verdict against all Serb people. “Mladić’s guilt is his and
his alone,” he said.

Mladić’s defence lawyer, Dragan Ivetic, announced that he would appeal against the convictions.

In Geneva, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, described Mladić as the “epitome of evil” and said his
conviction was a “momentous victory for justice”.

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12/18/2017 Ratko Mladić, the 'warlike youth' turned Balkan war criminal | World news | The Guardian

Ratko Mladić, the 'warlike youth' turned Balkan war criminal

He ordered many thousands of deaths and spent 14 years as a fugitive, then portrayed himself in court as a victim of conspiracies

Ratko Mladić in Sarajevo in August 1993 Photograph: STRINGER/EPA

Julian Borger
Wednesday 22 November 2017 06.35 EST

Ratko Mladić had vowed never to succumb to the humiliation he suffered on Wednesday morning, of being judged by a foreign
court. He told his officers he would not be taken alive and carried a duffel bag of guns through all his years on the run to ensure he
would be as good as his word.

When the critical moment came however, the man who ordered many thousands of deaths could not bring himself to take his
own. On 26 May 2011, when plainclothes officers from the Serbian interior ministry turned up at his final hiding place – a room in
his cousin’s house in a remote northern village – the old general, enfeebled by two strokes and a heart attack, left his Heckler &
Koch machine gun where he had stashed it, among his socks at the bottom of a cupboard.

“I suppose people will ask why I didn’t kill myself,” he grumbled to one of his supporters weeks later in jail. “But I was not
psychologically able to, and I didn’t want them to say we are family of suicides.”

Some 17 years earlier, in February 1994, when the Bosnian conflict was mired in a bloody stalemate, Mladić’s daughter, Ana, used
his favourite pistol to shoot herself. She was in love with a doctor, who was appalled at the slaughter in Bosnia being committed in
the name of the Serb nation. He would only marry her if she renounced her father. She resolved the dilemma by removing herself.

Mladić never accepted that his own actions had anything to do with Ana’s death. Instead, he invented conspiracy theories which
projected the blame outwards, on the historical enemies of the Serbs. His thirst for revenge redoubled. In a lifetime surrounded by
death, Ana’s was one of the very few that mattered to him.

Mladić was born into conflict. His name can be translated as “warlike youth”. His father, a partisan, was killed in battle in 1945,
when he was two. His mother, Stana, raised three children on her own.

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12/18/2017 Ratko Mladić, the 'warlike youth' turned Balkan war criminal | World news | The Guardian
As a teenager, Ratko had a go at being a tinsmith’s apprentice before giving it up and dedicating his life to the Yugoslav national
army. At the end of it all, after fighting in Croatia to keep a Serb-run Yugoslavia together and losing, and then fighting for a Serb-
dominated Bosnia, and losing again after the death of 100,000 people, Mladić spent 14 years as a fugitive before finally losing that
battle too.

Protesters hold posters, including one of Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb former
politician and convicted war criminal, as they wait for the verdict against Ratko Mladić.
Photograph: Michel Porro/Getty Images

“You have found who you’re looking for,” he told the officers from the war crimes unit who had come to find him. Mladić sat in a
rumpled black peaked cap in the back of the car on the drive south back to Belgrade. Once there, he had two requests for the
judge. He wanted to go to his mother’s grave in Bosnia, and to Ana’s grave in Belgrade. The judge granted the second request.
While government officials stood waiting to fly him to The Hague, he stood before her gravestone mumbling words to his
daughter.

In his six years in detention in the seafront Hague suburb of Scheveningen, and through his more than 500 days in court at the
international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Mladić has portrayed himself as a victim of foreign conspiracies to do
down the Serb people. It is this cult of victimhood that powered his brand of aggressive nationalism. It proved a rocket fuel for
sadism.

He repeatedly portrayed his “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia, targeted overwhelmingly against Muslim Bosniaks, as revenge
for the Ottoman empire. In July 1995, when he strode with his military aides into Srebrenica, which had supposedly been a “safe
haven” under UN protection which failed to materialise, he declared his “victory” as vengeance for an ancient massacre of Serbs at
the hands of “the Turks”. He was filmed patting eight-year-old Izudin Alić on the head, handing the hungry Bosniak boy a
chocolate bar and assuring the people of Srebrenica they would be safe. Within a few days, the boy’s father would be tracked down
and killed by Mladić’s troops, along with more than 7,000 Bosniak men and teenage boys.

For more than seven years, long after the bones of the dead had been dug out of mass graves, and the crimes of Mladić’s army had
been laid out for the world to witness, Serbia’s army looked after him in the name of ethnic solidarity in the face of a hostile world.

The fragile fiction in Bosnia, as in eastern Ukraine today, was that Bosnian Serb forces were freedom fighters thirsting for their
independence. In fact, they operated with the guidance and support of a stronger neighbour, Slobodan Milošević’s regime in
Belgrade.

Mladić and other Bosnian Serb officers were paid by the 30th Personnel Centre of the Yugoslav army, run from Belgrade. And
when Nato peacekeepers and western intelligence agencies operating in Bosnia began to get serious about tracking down war
crimes suspects in 1997, Mladić was sheltered and catered for in army recreation compounds across Serbia.

“The Serbian government and army were clearly protecting Mladić,” said John Sipher, a former CIA officer who took part in the
hunt for war crimes suspects when he was stationed in the Balkans.

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12/18/2017 Ratko Mladić, the 'warlike youth' turned Balkan war criminal | World news | The Guardian

Ratko Mladić in the court of the UN tribunal in 2014. Photograph: ICTY / HANDOUT/EPA

“I remember Montenegrins telling us about trips he made down there to see old friends in the military. He was clearly being
protected and felt comfortable living in Serbia.”

The CIA was aware Mladić spent some of his time as one of Europe’s most wanted men in his own house in a wealthy Belgrade
suburb where some US embassy employees lived. There was nothing the agency could do.

After Milošević fell in 2000, the country’s new prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, offered the US and the UK the option of going to grab
Mladić with their own troops. But Đinđić did not control the army, and the allies declined the offer rather than risk a gunfight on
the strength of an uncertain tip-off from a precariously positioned politician. Đinđić himself was assassinated in 2003.

Eventually, even the army had to bow to control from elected civilian governments, and Mladić was forced to rely on an ever
dwindling circle of loyalists. He took refuge in anonymous apartments and rural family plots. Even then however, he stayed
beyond his enemies’ reach.

“If you got a report that Mladić was at some place near the border where it might even be possible to go in, we had no sources that
we had tested over a long time, so it would have been a complete gamble,” Sipher recalled.

A Bosnian woman prays near a grave of her relative at the memorial centre of Potocari near
Srebrenica. Photograph: Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

In the end, Mladić was handed over by his fellow Serbs, weary of sanctions and isolation. But even with the culmination of his
five-year trial and his conviction, the triumph of international justice over impunity is far from complete.

Nationalism is very much back in the saddle in Serbia and the Bosnian Serb republic, along with blanket denial of war crimes. The
Serbian government announced last month that a convicted war criminal, Vladimir Lazarević, released from jail in 2005 after
serving two-thirds of his sentence, would be lecturing at the country’s military academy.

One of the investigators in The Hague tribunal’s tracking team, which played a coordinating role in the hunt for Balkan war
criminals, said he took a nostalgic motorcycle tour through Bosnia this summer and decided to make a detour to Mladić’s
birthplace in the Serb-run municipality of Kalinovik. As he got off his bike, he was greeted by a two-word message spray-painted
on a wall: “Mladić – Hero.”

Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor. His book on the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals, The Butcher’s
Trail, is published by Other Press.

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12/18/2017 Bosnians divided over Ratko Mladić guilty verdict for war crimes | World news | The Guardian
 

Bosnians divided over Ratko Mladić guilty verdict for war crimes
‘Even if he is sentenced 1,000 times to life in prison, justice would still not be served,’ says victim who lost relatives in massacre

Julian Borger
Wednesday 22 November 2017 12.19 EST

The reaction in Bosnia to the news of Ratko Mladić’s conviction for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity was as divided as the country itself, more than 20 years
after the end of the civil wars that followed the break-up of the Yugoslav state.

Among Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) the most common response was relief that the trial was finally over and that Mladić – unlike the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milošević – had
lived long enough to hear the guilty verdict. The relief was tinged with regret that justice had been such a long time coming and when it came, it appeared so puny alongside the
scale of pain and loss.

In the offices of the Sarajevo daily, Dnevni Avaz, Sead Numanović, a journalist, said staff watched in silence as the verdict and sentencing was delivered. “After hearing life in
prison, people started applauding, many crying in relief,” he said.

“I was silent, reflecting on the past, my memories as a young guy in besieged Sarajevo, not aware of evil surrounding me. I sensed some kind of emptiness.”

In Srebrenica, scene of the 1995 massacre that the tribunal confirmed constituted a genocide, that double-edged response was also apparent.

Nedžiba Salihović, whose father, husband and son were murdered, jumped to her feet the moment the life sentence was delivered.

Bosnian Muslims pray inside a makeshift memorial for Bosnian Muslim victims in The Hague. Photograph: Pierre Crom/Getty
Images

“Thank you, God! I kiss you God, for the sake of our sons!” she cried, according to Agence France-Presse. “Mladić will die in The Hague. I’m so happy that justice has been done.”

But others said the verdict was all but meaningless in the face of the slaughter of more than 7,000 men and boys.

“Even if he lives 1,000 times and is sentenced 1,000 times to life in prison, justice would still not be served,” Ajsa Umirovic, who lost 42 relatives in the massacre, said.

Since the end of the war, Bosniak survivors have returned to the area and live alongside Serbs, with whom they share local government, but the uneasy cohabitation does not
mean a shared view of history. Bosniaks say that they get along day by day with their Serb neighbours, as long as they do not mention what happened all around them in 1995.

Down the road from Srebrenica in Bratunac, posters were on display on Wednesday showing Mladić in his wartime uniform and describing him as a hero.

Denial of the atrocities committed by Mladic’s troops has become commonplace among the Bosnian Serb leadership.

Milorad Dodik, the leading politician in the Serb half of the country, Republika Srpska, claimed on Wednesday that the whole purpose of the Hague war crimes tribunal was to
demonise Serbs and called on Serbs to “forever erase every mention” of the court proceedings from their school textbooks. The history of the war has anyway largely been
ignored in the Bosnian Serb school syllabus.

In Serbia itself, the official reaction was more cagey. President Aleksandar Vučić, a former ultra-nationalist who is now seeking to strike a balance in relations with the EU and
Russia, alleged that the court was biased against Serbs, but added: “We are ready to accept our responsibility [for war crimes] while the others are not.”

The trial should mark a turning point, Vučić said, bidding “farewell to all those who want to return us to the past; we want to go to the future”.

Vladan Dinić, the editor of Svedok magazine in Belgrade, said: “This puts an end to the court which, for a civil war in former Yugoslavia, sentenced Serbs to 12 centuries of prison,
and Croats and Muslims to two centuries – with the latter being mostly convicted for the crimes against one another, not the Serbs.

“The consequence of the verdict will only be felt by Serbia and not Mladić , who due to ill health and the fact that he was denied the right to be seen by his doctors, probably will
not be around for much longer.

There was some disappointment in Bosnia that Mladic was not found guilty on one of the two counts of genocide, in municipalities like Prijedor in the west of the country where
there were murderous prison camps and mass killings. As in Srebrenica, the Serb authorities in Serbia have resisted acknowledging what happened.

“To me it is more important to dismantle this legacy of his that still lingers in my hometown than whether judges had the courage to call the crime what it was.”said Refik Hodžić,
a Prijedor survivor. He added that the verdict left him with a mixture of closure and rage.

“The rage comes from yet another manifestation of cowardice as he tried to subvert the proceedings and avoid the verdict in the most farcical of ways,” Hodžić said. “To think
that this coward was the master of life and death of tens of thousands of people and that he still enjoys a hero status among a good percentage of Serbs depresses me.”

In Sarajevo, Numanović observed: “Life will go on as it is now,” but warned that the chances of reconciliation would have to be left for future generations.

“With the current establishments in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia in particular, it is mission impossible.”

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

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