[ad_1]
Kalinovik (Bosnia and Herzegovina) (AFP)
Ratko Mladic insists he was chosen by “fate” to defend the Serbian people from a Western assault, but he will know on Tuesday if his fate is to spend the rest of his life in prison for genocide.
Judges will rule on his appeal against his 2017 conviction for war crimes in Bosnia, which judges in The Hague called “among the most heinous known to mankind.”
Among the most notorious is the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995 – genocide, the court ruled, orchestrated by military leader Mladic and his political comrade Radovan Karadzic.
The massacre – the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II – led media around the world to dub him “the butcher of Bosnia”.
Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein described him as “the epitome of evil” after his conviction.
But most Serbs still worship him.
“He was only defending his people,” Serbian veteran Ljubo Tomovic told AFP. “To condemn him would be a shame and a sin.”
Mladic, who is almost 70, has repeatedly promoted the image of himself as a “simple man” chosen to protect his people.
“Fate has put me in a position to defend my country which you Western powers have devastated with the help of the Vatican and the Western Mafia,” he said at his appeal hearing the year last.
Yet he oversaw a siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, for more than three years, its snipers and artillery shells killing thousands of men, women and children in the streets and in their homes. houses.
And video footage from Srebrenica shows him reassuring a 12-year-old Muslim boy shortly before his soldiers slaughter thousands of civilians.
A few days later, he is seen returning to a deserted Srebrenica, saying to the camera, “We are giving this town to the Serbian people as a gift.
Mladic formed a Serbian nationalist triumvirate with Karadzic and ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic which unleashed a wave of ethnic killings in an attempt to redraw the map of the region.
While Karadzic was the ideologue and Milosevic the cunning politician, Mladic was the soldier and his profession was in war.
– “Narcissistic, conceited” –
Mladic had barely caught his breath before his life was indelibly marked by conflict.
He was born during WWII in Kalinovik in eastern Bosnia – most accounts say in 1942, but Mladic told the court he was actually born in 1943.
Her father was killed at the bitter end of the war, fighting for Marshal Tito, the leader who succeeded in weaving the multi-ethnic state of Yugoslavia and quelling latent enmities.
By most accounts, Mladic always wanted to be a soldier.
He left for military training in Belgrade in the early 1960s, becoming an officer at the age of 22 and becoming commander of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war.
Despite being revered by his men, former Yugoslav army spokesman Ljubodrag Stojadinovic once described him as “narcissistic, conceited, conceited and arrogant”.
During the war, he confused international negotiators with rambling rants about Serbian history.
In the last days of the war, close allies questioned his mental faculties.
“I respected General Mladic as a soldier and a man,” former Montenegrin President Momir Bulatovic said in a BBC documentary from the 1990s.
“But after three years of war, he had lost touch with reality.”
– ‘There was no genocide’ –
Mladic was removed from his post after being indicted in 1995, but escaped capture for another 16 years.
At first he led a life of luxury, pampered by the Serbian military, but the pressure on him increased after Milosevic’s fall from power in 1999.
He was eventually arrested in May 2011 at his cousin’s country house in northern Serbia, his mind immediately turning to an incident during the war.
Not to the thousands of Muslims whose deaths he orchestrated, but rather to his daughter, Ana, who committed suicide in 1994 at the age of 23.
Some accounts say that she could not bear the shame of the crimes committed by her father, although Mladic’s family disputes this.
Her last request before being transferred to court was to visit her grave.
All the while, a legend had grown around him, his wartime leadership immortalized in murals around Republika Srpska – the Serbian entity in Bosnia.
Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik is among those who hail him as a hero, telling reporters last month: “There was no genocide in Srebrenica.
Many disagree.
“Genocide denial is the last phase of genocide,” said Serge Brammertz, prosecutor in The Hague.
AFP 2021
[ad_2]
picture credit