Ratko Mladić, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.
Mladić had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war.
He was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated “safe area” Srebrenica, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.
Mladić, who was nicknamed the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, had been in ill health after having a series of strokes.
A UN international tribunal confirmed Mladić’s death, saying he had died in hospital in The Hague earlier on Thursday.
“Mladić passed away today while hospitalised in The Hague,” the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement, adding that judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered “a full inquiry into the circumstances” of his death.
Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction, Mladić was one of the most notorious figures of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than one million homeless.
He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslim people and had boasted of being a “Serbian god”.
The news of Mladić’s death was first broken on Serbian state television after his son, Darko, had spoken earlier about his father’s declining health.
Sentenced By UN Tribunal
Mladić was sentenced by a UN tribunal to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide and war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1990s war.
He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run.
The slaughter in Srebrenica was the culmination of a brutal war that had lasted more than three years, during which Mladić oversaw the siege of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, which was pounded daily by artillery, tank and sniper fire, killing 10,000 people.
The goal of the Serbian leadership, which Mladić was tasked with implementing – as determined by the UN’s international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – was the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for the creation of a greater Serbia.
The tribunal found that Mladić, together with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milošević and the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
“I do not recognise this court,” Mladić said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced, he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!”
The Serbian campaign culminated in the horror of Srebrenica when, after the withdrawal of Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.
Mladić had the siege filmed to show him praising his “lads” and haranguing the UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands.
“We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladić said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who had once held the area as part of the Ottoman empire.
The next day, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for slaughter.
*PHOTO CAPTION: Mladić (l) with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić (right) in 1995. Karadžić was also sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide and war crimes.
