During the five-day orgy of slaughter at Srebrenica,
which Mladic is accused of being directly involved in, up to 8,000
Muslims were exterminated in what was described by the U.N. war crimes
tribunal as "the triumph of evil." A judge at The Hague tribunal
described what happened there in July 1995 as "truly scenes from hell
written on the darkest pages of human history."
Born in Kalnovik,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, during the height of World War II, the 70-year-old
was a career soldier who served in Yugoslavia's military before that
nation dissolved in the early 1990s.
Mladic was shaped by the
war when his father was killed by Croat Nazis when he was two years old.
In 1965 he graduated from a military academy and joined the Communist
Party in Yugoslavia, an ethnic stew of six states -- Bosnia, Serbia,
Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro.
Over the following three
decades he rose rapidly through the ranks of the Yugoslav army. By the
time he took Bosnia's battlefields he had become a hero to many Serbs,
seen as defender of their dwindling fortunes..
In May 1992, Bosnia's
Serbian political leaders picked him to head their forces and lead the
assault on their enemies. Bosnia's Muslim leaders wanted independence
while the Serbs wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia -- and the ethnic
majority.
Mladic wasted no time
galvanizing his heavily armed forces to besiege Sarajevo, cutting the
city off from the outside world by shelling and sniping at its poorly
prepared civilian population in the valley below them. More than 10,000
people, most of them civilians, were killed.
Over the course of the
three-year war that raged across the whole country more than a quarter
million people died, making the conflict the bloodiest in Europe since
World War II.
A French policeman who
collected evidence from Bosnian Muslims, Jean-Rene Ruez, told The Hague
tribunal in 1996 that Bosnian Serb forces killed and tortured refugees
in Srebrenica at will. Streets were littered with corpses, he said, and
rivers were red with blood. Many people committed suicide to avoid
having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, he said.
Among other lurid
accounts of mass murder, Ruez cited cases of adults being forced to kill
their children or watching as soldiers ended the young lives.
"One soldier approached a
woman in the middle of a crowd," he said. "Her child was crying. The
soldier asked why the child was crying and she explained that he was
hungry. The soldier made a comment like, 'He won't be hungry anymore.'
He slit the child's throat in front of everybody."
As the war ended in the
fall of 1995, Mladic went on the run. Over the years, he eluded
authorities while his cohort, Karadzic, was apprehended and is facing
various charges at the court in The Hague. Their mentor, former Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic, died in jail in 2006 during his trial at
The Hague.
Eventually, more than 16
years later, he was captured an hour's drive from the Serbian capital
living on a farm with a cousin. World leaders and human rights groups
described the arrest as "historic" and "an important step forward."
Key dates in hunt for Mladic
U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon called it a "historic day for international justice. This
arrest marks an important step in our collective fight against
impunity." Interpol called Mladic "Europe's most wanted war crimes
suspect" while Amnesty International's law chief Widney Brown said "at
last the people who suffered have hope he will be brought to justice."
The arrest meant a major
hurdle that once stood between Serbia and its long-awaited entrance
into the European Union was overcome, but the trial could also usher in
political backlash from the country's electorate, some of whom consider
Mladic a hero. continue Reading
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