Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide over Srebrenica massacre, dies

Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” of Srebrenica, has died, a UN official said on Thursday. The killings were Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two.

Srebrenica and the Bosnian war

The Srebrenica massacre was the culmination of a war that had lasted for more than three years. During the conflict, Mladic’s nationalist Serb army shelled the besieged Bosnian capital Sarajevo daily with artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns, killing 10,000 people.

Over four days in July 1995, those killed in Srebrenica were buried in mass graves. Some bodies were later exhumed and moved to remote mountain locations in an effort to conceal evidence of the killings.

The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) determined that the objective was “ethnic cleansing”, defined as the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for a Greater Serbia.

Conviction and tribunal proceedings

The ICTY found that Mladic, former 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 said during an ICTY hearing in 2014. When he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017, he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!”

According to his son, documents listed Mladic’s date of birth as March 12, 1942, although he was born on March 8, 1943.

Years as a fugitive

Karadzic, who was also convicted of genocide in 2016, and Mladic were among the ICTY’s most wanted fugitives for years after Western powers ended the war. Until Milosevic was removed in a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived securely, though discreetly, in Belgrade.

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

The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was marked by ruthlessness, daring and brutality, reflecting a Serb warrior tradition that had been valued during the partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.