The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, popularly nicknamed "the butcher of Bosnia" and sentenced in November 2017 for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian War (1992-1995), has died this Thursday at the age of 84 in a hospital in the Hague prison, where he was serving a life sentence.
Mladic – convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) after being found guilty of ten charges, including genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995 – had suffered several strokes during his time in prison.
Recently, his family had requested the court to allow him to receive medical attention in a military hospital in Serbia for humanitarian reasons, a request also supported by Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
The Secretary of State of the Ministry of Human Rights and Minorities, Lidija Pavicevic, has confirmed the death of the former Bosnian Serb commander after being informed by his son, Darko Mladic, according to the news agency Tanjug.
Mladic – arrested in May 2011 in Lazarevo, a small town in northern Serbia, after being on the run from justice for more than a decade – was the chief of staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996.
The Hague Tribunal issued an international arrest warrant against him in July 1995. He was ultimately found guilty of one count of genocide related to Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslims were captured and taken to warehouses, schools, and camps, where they were executed en masse over several days.
The ICTY structured the conviction against Mladic through the legal figure of "joint criminal enterprise," which distributed his criminal responsibility into four major blocks: the genocide of Srebrenica, the massacres of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, the prolonged siege of Sarajevo – one of the longest in contemporary history – and the kidnapping of United Nations peacekeepers.
The court concluded that Mladic ordered continuous bombings and sniper fire against targets with little or no military value in Sarajevo, in order to keep the civilian population in "a state of constant distress" and spread terror among its inhabitants.
Siege of Sarajevo and attacks on the market
The siege of the Bosnian capital lasted from 1992 to 1995 and included attacks against the Sarajevo market: the first, in February 1994, caused at least 68 deaths; the second, in August 1995, occurred when five mortar shells fired by the Army of the Republika Srpska ended the lives of 43 people.
Furthermore, the court highlighted that the UN blue helmets were unable to fulfill their mandate to protect the civilian population because they were held back even at gunpoint, being chained to ammunition depots, bridges, and command centers to prevent NATO aviation from attacking the strategic Serb-Bosnian positions.
However, the court acquitted Mladic of a charge of genocide for the massacres committed by the Serb-Bosnian forces in six localities in 1992, as it found insufficient evidence of a genocidal intent against the entire Bosniak community, predominantly Muslim, and considered that the pursued objective was ethnic cleansing.
The Srebrenica massacre is considered the worst atrocity recorded in Europe since the Holocaust and has become a symbol of the barbarities committed in the Balkans during the 1990s. The ICTY's sentences formally recognize it as genocide.