\n<\/p>\n
BELGRADE: Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a U.N.-designated \u201csafe area\u201d of Bosnia, Europe\u2019s worst atrocity since World War Two, died on Thursday in U.N. custody.<\/strong><\/p>\n The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machineguns of his nationalist \u200bSerb army, killing 10,000.<\/span><\/p>\n The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the \u200ckillings.<\/span><\/p>\n The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d \u2014 the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.<\/span><\/p>\n The tribunal found that Mladic, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI do not recognise this court,\u201d Mladic, dubbed the \u201cButcher of Bosnia\u201d by his opponents, said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 he shouted: \u201cThis is all lies, \u200byou are all liars!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Mladic died in U.N. custody on Thursday, his lawyer Dragan Ivetic said, without giving a cause. He had spent his last months in the hospital ward of the U.N. detention centre holding him in a suburb \u200bof The Hague, Ivetic added.<\/span><\/p>\n According to his son, documents gave Mladic\u2019s date of birth as March 12, 1942, but he was actually born on March 8, 1943.<\/span><\/p>\n Karadzic, also convicted of genocide in 2016, and Mladic topped the ICTY wanted list for years after Western powers ended the war. But until Milosevic was toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived securely \u2014 if discreetly \u2014 in Belgrade.<\/span><\/p>\n Milosevic died in detention on \u200bMarch 11, 2006, a few months before a verdict in his four-year tribunal trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.<\/span><\/p>\n The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness, daring and brutality in the Serb warrior \u200btradition, once prized in the life-or-death partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.<\/span><\/p>\n In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water; were starved and raped in prison camps; were made to jump off a bridge and shot; and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cFor me Mladic is a symbol of all horrible crimes that happened during the war \u2014 our girls were raped, and boys killed, only because they were Muslim,\u201d said \u200bMunira Subasic, whose son and husband were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran Srebrenica.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cGermans had Hitler, Serbs have Mladic,\u201d Subasic continued. \u201cThere is no difference between the two.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, to show \u200bhim extolling his \u201clads\u201d and haranguing Dutch U.N. peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. Srebrenica supposedly had \u201csafe area\u201d status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWe give this town to the Serb people as a gift,\u201d Mladic said \u200cto the camera, \u2060claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who once held the area as part of the Ottoman Empire.<\/span><\/p>\n The next day, Mladic\u2019s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for execution.<\/span><\/p>\n When NATO tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited air strikes, his troops defiantly seized U.N. peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets.<\/span><\/p>\n In November 1996 Mladic and top generals gave in to strong Western pressure that he step down as ordered by Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, who succeeded Karadzic and was later jailed for her role in war crimes.<\/span><\/p>\n The son of a World War Two partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladic was an officer in the \u200bold communist Yugoslav People\u2019s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia\u2019s disintegration began in \u200b1991.<\/span><\/p>\n When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia\u2019s Muslim-led secession, \u2060Mladic was picked to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the landlocked country.<\/span><\/p>\n Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA and villages were burned down as 22,000 troops of the U.N. Protection Force stood by more or less helplessly, with orders not to take sides.<\/span><\/p>\n A combination of Western pressure, covert American arms and training \u200bfor Croats and Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladic\u2019s army. Determined NATO strikes did the rest.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite Western appeals, the reformists ruling Serbia after Milosevic\u2019s fall did not \u200bdare move against a man who was \u2060a hero to a core of nationalist Serbs.<\/span><\/p>\n Sporadic sightings put him at a Belgrade horse race or a soccer match. In 2004, NATO said he had toasted hard-drinking old comrades at his former bunker in Han Pijesak, Bosnia.<\/span><\/p>\n When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance. His right arm was lame, the apparent result of an untreated stroke. He looked nothing like the burly general in camouflage who ruffled the hair of a Srebrenica boy in 1995.<\/span><\/p>\n He suffered a heart attack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. \u2060By his own \u200baccount, he felt like a frail old man.<\/span><\/p>\n In his few court appearances, he wavered between self-pity, smiling defiance and vague distraction.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI am a very sick man,\u201d \u200bMladic pleaded to the court.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2019, Mladic told the judges that he was too ill to participate in outdoor exercises and requested leave to visit the graves of family members in Serbia. The request was denied.<\/span><\/p>\n His appeal against conviction was rejected in 2021, as were repeated requests for his release on compassionate grounds.<\/span><\/p>\n\u2018GERMANS HAD HITLER, SERBS HAVE \u2060MLADIC\u2019<\/span><\/h2>\n
SON OF PARTISAN FIGHTER<\/span><\/h2>\n
SICK AND FRAIL<\/span><\/h2>\n