FILE: Trial of former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic begins in The Hague - Profile

Record ID: 695099

  • Title: FILE: Trial of former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic begins in The Hague - Profile
  • Date: 16th May 2012
  • Summary: MOUNT OZREN, BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA (ORIGINALLY 4:3) (FILE - MAY 19, 1994) (REUTERS- FILIPOVIC) RATKO MLADIC WALKING UP HILLSIDE WITH SERB SOLDIERS MLADIC AND SERB OFFICER POINTING TO FRONT LINE MLADIC AND BOSNIAN SERB LEADER RADOVAN KARADZIC LOOKING AT FRONT LINE CLOSE OF MLADIC
  • Embargoed: 31st May 2012 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Netherlands, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia
  • City:
  • Country: Netherlands
  • Topics: Crime,Conflict,People
  • Reuters ID: LVA7JDQ4EO3XTNRSW0E7V1YUM0T2
  • Story Text: Former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic goes on trial on Wednesday (May 16) in a case that will establish if he was responsible for some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War Two.
    Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) accuse Mladic of genocide, murder, acts of terror and other crimes against humanity during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.
    Mladic, 70, was one of the first big names from the wars that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia to be indicted by the court and is the last of them to go on trial.
    He was indicted in 1995 along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs' political leader, although both remained free in former Yugoslavia for more than a decade before being arrested and passed to The Hague. Karadzic's trial is already under way.
    Former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic was indicted in 1999 and went on trial in The Hague in 2001, but died in 2006 before a verdict was reached.
    Prosecutors say Mladic was part of a "joint criminal enterprise to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by killing the men and boys ... and forcibly removing the women, young children and some elderly men".
    They say Bosnian Serb forces (BSF) attempted to hide the slaughter by dumping victims in remote unmarked graves. "When it became apparent that despite these efforts the world had learned of the mass murder of Srebrenica's Muslim men, BSF implemented (an) ... operation designed to further conceal the bodies and the crimes," said a pre-trial brief.
    "Thousands of corpses were dug up with excavators, moved in trucks and dumped in even more remote locations."
    Bodies were later found strewn across 17 primary and 37 secondary mass graves.
    Mladic is also held responsible for the siege and bombardment of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which killed 10,000 civilians. The prosecution described it as a plan to "spread terror among the civilian population".
    The horrors of the siege, together with the Srebrenica massacre, eventually galvanised world opinion in support of the campaign of Western air strikes on Bosnian Serb targets that brought the conflict to an end shortly after.
    Mladic lived openly in Belgrade in the early years after his indictment, going into hiding after Milosevic's fall in 2000.
    Growing pressure for his capture from the European Union left him ever more isolated over the following decade, as Serbia moved towards EU membership.
    In May 2011 he was arrested in a farmhouse in northern Serbia, penniless and in poor health. He recently had an operation for what is believed to have been a hernia, and during pre-trial hearings his attention appeared to wander.
    The prosecution has simplified its case at the request of judges in order to speed up the trial, halving the number of individual crimes mentioned in the 11 counts against him.
    The ICTY was established in 1993 in response to the failure of diplomatic pressure to end the Yugoslav wars, during which Mladic's ethnic Serb army seized 70 percent of Bosnian territory, brutally cleansing it of Muslims and ethnic Croats.
    It was the first international war crimes court to be set up since the Nuremberg military tribunals at the end of World War Two, and has paved the way for others.
    They include the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which last month convicted former Liberian leader Charles Taylor of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity.
    Over the past 19 years, the ICTY has managed to arrest all of its 161 indictees, defying sceptics who doubted whether its biggest targets would ever be brought to face justice.
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