Former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, whose murderous role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s led to his moniker as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, has died in prison, aged 84.
Serbian state media reported the death of Mladic on Thursday. The reports said that Mladic died in a UN prison hospital in The Hague, Netherlands.
A family member of Mladic, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, confirmed the reports for the AP and said Mladic’s son, Darko Mladic, was on the way to the Hague.
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The former general was in the jail serving a life sentence after he was convicted of 10 charges, including genocide and war crimes, in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
One of those charges included his actions in Sbrebrenica in 1995, where he oversaw the massacre of 8000 Muslim men and boys. It came to be known as the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
The ruthless, blue-eyed former communist officer-turned nationalist warlord, was one of the most notorious figures of the conflict that left more than 100,000 people dead and over 1 million homeless. During the 1992-1995 ethnic war triggered by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, he commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a “Serbian God.”
When the war started in 1992, Mladic became the commander of the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swaths of the country to form a Serb mini-state.
Serbs under Mladic’s control laid siege to the capital, Sarajevo, and other cities and villages, including Sbrebrenica, established concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, and systematically killed prisoners.
But Mladic himself and his admirers among the Serbs have never repented. He was seen by many as a patriot fighting for the first pan-Serbian state. Defiant, Mladic acted bullishly during his trial and yelled at the judges when sentenced to life in prison.
Mladic was born March 12, 1942, in the tiny Bosnian village of Bozinovici, in the hills 40 kilometres south of Sarajevo. Like other protagonists in the Yugoslav conflict, he imbibed nationalism from his family’s fate in World War II — his own father was killed by Croats.
A communist-era officer, Mladic sided with the Serbs as Yugoslavia disintegrated in the war. Mladic first led a Serb insurgency in Croatia before taking over the Bosnian Serb army that was backed by Serbia and then-president Slobodan Milosevic, who also died in the custody of the Hague court in 2006 while on trial for genocide.
Mladic was known for his obsession with his nation’s history. He saw Bosnia’s war as a chance for revenge against the onetime 500-year-long Ottoman occupation of Serbia. He often referred to Bosnia’s Muslims as Turks and boasted of revenge when his troops overran the protected UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
“The time has come … for revenge against Turks in these regions,” Mladic said after taking over Srebrenica.
A UN “safe haven” for Muslims, Srebrenica ended up overrun by Serbs who separated the men and boys, forced them to strip, killed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves in a brutal rampage that lasted for over a week.
The Srebrenica survivors said one image forever will be imprinted in their minds: Mladic handing out candy to Muslim children who had been rounded up on the town’s square and reassuring them that everything would be all right — even patting one child on the head.
Convinced of the power of his army, he used to tell his soldiers: “When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God.” To clear the way for his helicopter to land, he would tell air traffic controllers: “Here speaks Ratko Mladic — The Serbian God.”
Sarajevans still remember his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992. He issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble the signal, which was picked up and taped by the Sarajevo police.
“Turn toward Velesici, there are no Serbs there,” Sarajevans could hear Mladic ordering his artillery to pound the Sarajevo suburb.
“Scorch their brains,” he told his gunmen.
Faced with the UN tribunal’s genocide indictment after the end of the conflict, Mladic in 1996 began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
Ratko Mladic, pictured during his arrest on May 26, 2011, in Serbia after years in hiding. Credit: DMV AMB**LON**/AP
With his wife, Bosa, Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats. His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.
Surrounded by security guards, he occasionally ventured out of the dense pine forest to mark events such as the anniversary of the Bosnian Serb army and St Vitus Day, a religious festival marking the 1389 Serb defeat by the Turks at Kosovo.
When in the late 1990s his trail grew too hot in Bosnia, Mladic moved with family into a suburban villa in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.
In Belgrade, he was seen attending his son’s wedding. He showed up at soccer games, dined in plush restaurants and frequented elite cafes, refusing to give interviews and smiling quizzically when photographed.
When Milosevic was ousted from power in October 2000, and Yugoslavia’s new pro-democracy authorities signaled they might hand Mladic over to the tribunal, tabloids reported that he had left Belgrade for Bosnia.
But true to his style, Mladic countered those rumours and others that said he was terminally ill in Belgrade. Before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen in public, sometimes with his guards and sometimes alone, driving a boxy Yugo car on the streets of the capital.
He completely disappeared from public view in 2008 and was finally arrested in May 2011 in a village near Belgrade where he was hiding in a relative’s modest house.
In court in The Hague, a frail-looking old man was far from an image of Mladic from the war days. But his unrepentant nature and defiance were intact.
“Everything you said is pure lies. Shame on you!” he yelled at the UN judges when they handed down the conviction.
Mladic was the last major figure to face justice from the conflict that ended more than a quarter-century ago. At the time of his death his appeal was still being heard by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals — a court that deals with remaining cases from the now-closed UN tribunals for Rwanda and the Balkan wars.
Already in poor health upon arrest in 2011, Mladic is believed to have suffered multiple strokes during his years on the run and was hospitalized on several occasions while in custody.
His health battles were documented earlier this year, when his defence team argued in March that the former warlord was in a “state of advanced, irreversible medical decline,” and should be released.
Mladic had to be taken to the emergency room earlier that month for an unspecified health incident, according to the order.
