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An international court in The Hague on Tuesday confirmed the life sentence against the former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, baptized as the ‘butcher of Srebrenica’ for his responsibility in the genocide committed in July 1995 in this town.
78-year-old Ratko Mladic was convicted in 2017 of genocide and crimes against humanity, among other reasons for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo . However, both the defense and the Prosecutor’s Office appealed the ruling, in the first case to demand acquittal.
The trial fell to the International Residual Mechanism of Criminal Tribunals, which took over the cases that the ICTY still had pending after its closure. The hearings were supposed to begin in May 2020, but were initially postponed due to Mladic’s health and later due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and did not begin until August.
The Srebrenica genocide is considered the worst atrocity to occur on European soil since the Holocaust. In addition to this massacre, Mladic was also condemned for the 40-month siege on Sarajevo, the inhumane treatment of prisoners in detention camps and the taking of UN soldiers as hostages.
The former Bosnian Serb general was a fugitive from justice for 16 years before being arrested in 2011. After the postponements of the last part of the judicial process against him, the verdict was therefore not known until a decade after his arrest.
After the Bosnian War, Ratko Mladic, moved to Belgrade, where he lived in an upper-class suburb, protected by Slobodan Milošević. According to one of his bodyguards, until 2002 he led a relatively normal life, going to soccer games and restaurants. .
On July 25, 1995, Ratko Mladic was indicted in the first instance by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), charged with the charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and numerous other crimes (including relating to the alleged sniper shooting campaign) against the civilian population of Sarajevo and other areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 16 November of the same year, the initial charges were expanded to include those relating to the attack on the safe area of ​​Srebrenica in July 1995: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.He was also charged with hostage-taking among United Nations personnel. The court has documentary evidence and recordings certifying its responsibility in both cases.
Declared a fugitive by the court, suspicions about his whereabouts focused on Serbia and the Republika Srpska. Some reports have revealed that he took refuge in his war bunker in Han Pijesak, not far from Sarajevo, or in Montenegro.
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