First Osama Bin Laden, now Ratko Mladic. But while the Bosnian Serb commander enjoyed nothing like the profile of the Al Qaeda leader, his was a considerably greater butcher’s bill.
For many Serbs, General Mladic is a war hero rather than a national disgrace. But while he was still at large their country remained a European pariah. The intriguing question about his arrest concerns its timing and, as with Bin Laden, how many people in high places had known of his whereabouts all along.
The 69-year-old ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ had been living a life of quiet obscurity in the village of Lazarevo, just 50 miles from the Serbian capital Belgrade, where he posed as just another retired soldier.
Arrest: Ratko Mladic, pictured here in 1995 addressing his troops, will stand trial for a litany of war crimes
Although said to be in poor health after more than a decade on the run he was carrying two pistols when he was seized yesterday by Serbian security forces, apparently acting on a tip-off. He failed however to carry out an earlier promise to go down fighting rather than be taken alive.
He will now be extradited to the Hague to stand trial for a litany of pitiless war crimes. Burly, brutish and unrepentant, Mladic was a key military player throughout the genocidal civil wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, which saw the deaths of 200,000 of its citizens.
But he is most notorious for his presiding roles in the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebenica. The latter was the worst atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.
Grim: A Bosnian worker passes by a human skull during exhumation at the mass grave site in the village of Budak, Bosnia
No exact figure can be put on the number of unarmed Bosnian Muslim boys and men who were executed when Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN ‘safe haven’ in July 1995.
When Mladic stands in the dock at the international war crimes court in the Hague to hear his indictment read out the murders will be put at ‘more than 7,000’. Some 25,000 Muslim women, children and elderly were also expelled from the region.
It was the nadir of the ethnic cleansing military campaigns that marked the Yugoslav conflict. It is an irony that its perpetrator will now stand trial in the Netherlands, the country whose soldiers, operating under the UN flag, shamingly stood by and let the massacre take place.
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