Minutes before an international war-crimes tribunal in The Hague
convicted him, last week, of committing genocide, Ratko Mladić, the
former Serbian Army commander, now a doddering seventy-four-year-old
man, mocked the charges against him. “Everything you said is pure lies,”
Mladić shouted at the three-judge panel, midway through his sentencing.
“Shame on you!” Mladić was removed from the courtroom, and the judges
formally declared him guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against
humanity, for his role in the most monstrous acts committed in Europe
since the Second World War.
A three-judge panel, comprised of jurists from the Netherlands, South
Africa, and Germany, ruled that, as part of Mladić’s drive to terrorize
Muslims and Croats into leaving a self-declared Serb mini-state, “groups
of women, and girls as young as twelve-years-old, were routinely and
brutally raped” by Mladić’s forces. The judges detailed how soldiers
under Mladić’s command killed, brutalized, and starved unarmed Muslim
and Croat prisoners: twenty-four prisoners suffocated and died inside a transport truck; in one camp, soldiers machine-gunned a hundred and ninety prisoners; and, in one case,
“detainees were forced to rape and engage in other degrading sexual acts
with one another.” Mladić’s forces “deliberately shelled and sniped the
civilian population of Sarajevo,” while the residents were “walking with
their children, fetching water, collecting wood or while at the market.”
Mladić’s forces took U.N. peacekeepers hostage in order to thwart
retaliatory NATO air strikes, and, in the final months of the conflict,
after taking the town of Srebrenica, “systematically murdered several
thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys.” “The crimes committed rank among
the most heinous known to humankind,” Alphons Orie, the presiding judge,
declared, before sentencing Mladić to life in prison.
Americans, particularly younger ones, can be forgiven for being confused
by the verdict’s timing. Mladić committed his crimes more than twenty
years ago, during the war in Bosnia. After a U.S.-brokered peace accord
ended the conflict, which had killed a hundred thousand people, Mladić
went into hiding. He evaded arrest for fourteen years. His trial is the
last to be heard by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia, a twenty-four-year-old U.N.-created body that adjudicated
the cases of all hundred and sixty-one people it indicted for war
crimes, including sixty-five who were arrested and brought to The Hague
to face justice.
The judges’ written verdict is two thousand five hundred and twenty-six pages
long—the product of a five-year trial that included five-hundred and ninety-one
witnesses and nearly ten thousand exhibits. Mladić’s defenders dismissed the
verdict as part of a conspiracy against him; his defense lawyers said
that they would appeal. Mladić’s son, Darko, said his
father told him after the verdict that the tribunal was a “NATO commission . . . trying to criminalize a legal endeavor of Serbian people in times of
civil war to protect itself from the aggression.” RT, the Russian
state-backed broadcaster, has repeatedly aired news pieces questioning
whether thousands of Muslims were, in fact, murdered in Srebrenica.
Diplomats who tried to end the war and journalists who covered it,
including myself, had hoped that the tribunal would finally provide some
answers to unresolved questions, including why Mladić chose
to slaughter so many, so openly. The verdict stated that a day after
Srebrenica fell, on July 12th, Bosnian Serb forces abandoned an earlier
plan to house the thousands of captured Muslim men and boys in a prison
camp in the town of Batković. Instead, they carried out summary
executions in a half-dozen locations across eastern Bosnia. The
logistics of the killings speak to their premeditation. Scores of buses
were needed to move the men and boys to execution sites. Dozens of
executioners, willing to shoot unarmed prisoners, needed to be
recruited. Remote fields, a community center, and a farm were chosen as
killing grounds. Backhoes and excavators were used to dig mass graves
and fill them with corpses.
After the verdict, Carl Bildt, a European Union and U.N. peace envoy who
had met with Mladić during the conflict and demanded that he protect the
Srebrenica prisoners, told me that Mladić’s decision still haunted him.
While prosecutors were able to get some Serb officials to testify
against Mladić, the thinking of the General when he ordered the killings
remains unclear.
“Why? That’s still somewhat of mystery,” Bildt told me by e-mail.
“Perhaps they simply got overwhelmed by the logistics of handling
thousands of prisoners,” or “anger/revenge/hatred easily took them into
what for the moment might have looked like the easiest way of handling
the situation.” He added, “Perhaps. But I’m still struggling.”
David Harland, a former senior United Nations diplomat in Bosnia, said
that the mass executions amounted to a strategic blunder by Mladić,
because their scale forced the United States and NATO to intervene against the Serbs in
the conflict. “The great mystery remains why,”
Harland told me. “Not why so cruel, but why so stupid?”
Hasan Nuhanović, a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre, told me that the
General’s motives were unimportant to him. “I really don’t care why
Mladić did that or this,” he said. “I don’t care if he had a motive. The
only thing I care about is that he did it.”
Nuhanović, whose father, mother, and brother were executed after Dutch
peacekeepers handed them over to Mladić’s forces, called on the
international community to take its promise to protect civilians more
seriously. In a series of actions in Srebrenica that became a model for
how not to intervene in a conflict in the future, the U.N. declared the
surrounded town a “safe area,” seized the heavy weapons that its Bosnian
Muslim inhabitants had used to defend themselves, and then made scant
effort to protect the enclave when Mladić’s forces overran it. The U.N.
peacekeeping mission in the town abetted the killings instead of
preventing them.
“I think we should try to look at things in a very simple way. It was a
U.N. safe area. Full stop,” Nuhanović said. “This was supposed to be a
prevention of genocide, not a continuation.”
In their verdict, the judges cited as part of Mladić’s motivation his
repeated statements that Muslim fighters in Srebrenica had killed Serb
civilians earlier in the war. (Bosnian Muslims had killed several
hundred Serb civilians around the enclave, a far smaller number than the
seven thousand killed by Mladić’s forces in 1995.) During the war,
Mladić also repeatedly invoked the abuse of Serbs by the Ottoman Empire,
which occupied the former Yugoslavia for centuries. As evidence of Mladić’s bigotry, the judges pointed to a 1994
Serb television video that showed him gleefully touring a village that had
been emptied of Muslims, whom Mladić called “Turks.”
“Here is the village of Plane, it used to be Turkish. Now we will go
toward it,” Mladić says, speaking to an unidentified cameraman. “Let our
Serbs see what we have done to them, how we took care of the Turks . . . we
thrashed the Turks. If the Americans and English, the Ukrainians and
Canadians in Srebrenica, in the meantime it’s the Dutch, would not
protect them, they would have disappeared from this area long ago . . . See
what a village they got. Look there,” Look there,” Mladić adds, as the
camera shows destroyed homes. “Should I slow down a bit so you can film
them? . . . . Film it. Look what a house this Turk motherfucker had! This is
a Turkish house . . . this was a Turkish house. The one over there was
Turkish and that one, all of them.”
It seems then that Mladić was driven by simple bigotry. In the ruling,
the judges also cited a Dutch peacekeeper’s testimony that the General
warned him of the dangers of living with Muslims and members of other
races. “Mladić, commenting on the dark skin-colour of one of the
DutchBat officers, told the witness that multi-ethnic societies were a
problem for the Netherlands and that in ten years time he would be in
the Netherlands, with his soldiers to protect the Dutch from Muslims and
other races.”
Mladić was wrong. Today, he is in a Dutch jail cell, where he is likely
to die. Yet the prejudice-laced historical narratives that he used to
justify his crimes persist. Milorad Dodik, the President of the
autonomous Serb region created by Mladić’s expulsions of Muslims and Croats, said
that, regardless of the verdict, the General “remains a legend of the
Serb nation.” In Serbia, formerly discredited nationalist politicians
are regaining prominence. And leaders who play on nationalist sentiment
and xenophobia are again winning
votes across Europe. Last month, Austria followed Hungary and Poland in moving
to the right. Some argue that the same political dynamic is at work in
the United States. The willingness of opportunistic leaders to vilify
minorities, and then flatly deny it, lives on.