ANALYSIS: The international community was tainted by its dalliance with Mladic – a bully, coward and, worst of all, a butcher, writes IAN TRAYNOR
THE CAPTURE of Gen Ratko Mladic closes more than a decade of duplicity for many parties in the Balkans and beyond.
Serbia’s post-Slobodan Milosevic democracy remained stigmatised and isolated for as long as its military, security apparatus and gangsters sheltered the general, military mastermind of the destruction of Bosnia.
The United Nations, Nato, the Netherlands, France and the world’s mightiest spy services were all tainted by their appeasement of Mladic and by the extended failure, or reluctance, to apprehend the man said to be the most infamous mass murderer in Europe.
Mladic and partner-in-crime Radovan Karadzic were the military and political leaders, dubbed the psychopath and the psychiatrist, of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 war. The men were, at least initially, creatures of the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Both are now in custody; Karadzic was seized by Serbian intelligence in 2008.
Mladic is most infamous for the biggest single massacre of the Bosnian war at Srebrenica in 1995. But for the previous four years he was the most ruthless and determined instrument of Milosevic’s disastrous strategy to hijack Yugoslavia and carve a Greater Serbia from the ruins of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
In June 1991, weeks before the Yugoslav wars opened, Mladic was made military commander of the Yugoslav army garrison in Knin. Within six months he had helped Milosevic partition Croatia, seizing control of a quarter of the country and in the process pulverising the Danube town of Vukovar.
Those gains were then consolidated behind a UN peace plan in January 1992, devised by Cyrus Vance, the former US secretary of state who became UN special envoy to the region.
Two months after that plan came into effect, Mladic was made commander of the Bosnian Serb military in May 1992 when Milosevic formally separated the Bosnian from the Yugoslav military.
What followed was a whirlwind of murder, pogrom, siege and destruction, which gave birth to the term “ethnic cleansing”. A senior UN official, who spent hours haggling with Mladic in Knin, characterised him as “a psychopath – highly intelligent and profoundly violent”.
Mladic liked to parade as a proud Serbian military officer. His war in Bosnia, however, was that of bully and coward – a war against defenceless civilians.
By the end of 1992, Mladic’s blitzkrieg had left tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims dead, put two million to flight, their homes looted and torched, their cemeteries and mosques bulldozed into oblivion.
The 15 counts of genocide, murder, extermination, hostage-taking, and persecution he now faces in The Hague were the means, according to the charge sheet, to “the elimination or permanent removal, by force or other means of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat or other non-Serb inhabitants from large areas of Bosnia”.
The Srebrenica massacre was the terrible climax of the Serbian project in Bosnia. He entered the enclave in July 1995 with the sinister assurance: “Don’t worry, no one will be harmed.”
By the end of the same year he had been indicted for genocide at Srebrenica. This indictment came while he was already facing other charges concerning ethnic cleansing and the three-year siege of Sarajevo imposed by his forces.
Mladic was born in the village of Bozinovici in eastern Herzegovina in March 1942, an area prone to strong nationalist sentiment.
When he was three years old, his father, a Titoist partisan, was killed fighting Croatian fascist Ustasha forces.
In the 1990s Mladic repeatedly claimed to have been traumatised by his father’s death and to always have been on a mission of vengeance, although the greater family tragedy came in 1994 when his adored daughter, Ana, a 23-year-old Belgrade medical student, killed herself at the height of the Bosnian war.
When Ana killed herself, a distraught Mladic went to the mortuary in Belgrade, where a senior Yugoslav Muslim doctor was on duty. According to Mirko Klarin, an authority on Yugoslav war crimes, Mladic bellowed at the doctor, ordering him out on ethnic grounds. He then proceeded to apply make-up to his daughter’s face.
Whatever the impact of family tragedy and tension on the general, amateur psychologists speculated that the suicide unhinged Mladic, contributing to eruptions of rage and violence in Gorazde in 1994 when he faced down Britain’s Gen Sir Michael Rose, at Bihac in 1995 when he responded to Nato air strikes by taking 200 UN troops hostage and finally at Srebrenica.
After that, for much of the past decade, he lived reasonably openly, clearly feeling he had nothing to fear. He was frequently seen in the better suburbs of Belgrade, in city restaurants, at football games and weddings. Only after 2002 did he disappear.
Over the past year the Serbian government has started coaxing senior police and military figures into surrendering to The Hague tribunal.
The Mladic arrest was preceded by a struggle between his supporters, Yugoslav military security, and the secret police, more loyal to the prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica.
Radovan Karadzic, his peer, partner and sometime rival, was seized by Serbian intelligence in July 2008.
Given the volume of evidence against Mladic and the sentences already handed down to many of his subordinates, it now appears inevitable that he will spend his old age behind bars.
Ian Traynor is a Guardiancorrespondent who reported from the Balkans throughout the 1990s