Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who led the Srebrenica massacre and siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan Wars, has died in prison at the age of 84.
Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” was convicted in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for masterminding a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnia’s non-Serbs in the early 1990s.
A United Nations-established tribunal found him guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, persecution, extermination, murder, terrorism, unlawful attacks on civilians, and hostage-taking.
At the time of Mladic’s indictment, ICTY Judge Fuad Riyad described the actions overseen by the former general as “an act of unimaginable barbarity”.
Mladic died while serving a life sentence at a United Nations detention center in The Hague, his lawyer Dragan Ivetic told CNN. He spent more than 15 years in prison.
After his conviction, Mladic filed multiple appeals and requests for release on medical grounds. The final lawsuit was filed by his attorney just last week.
They called for his early release on humanitarian grounds, saying that doctors at the detention center said his “general condition has rapidly deteriorated” and warned that his death “could occur at any time.” Your request has been denied.
Mladic was born on March 12, 1942 in the city of Kalinovic, then Yugoslavia. Born at the height of World War II, his childhood was deeply affected by the conflict. Her father, Neja Mladic, was murdered by the Ustaše regime, a Croatian fascist movement set up by the Nazis and Fascist Italy in occupied Yugoslavia, which carried out genocide against Jews, Serbs, and Roma.
Ratko Mladic trained at the Yugoslav People’s Army Military Academy in Belgrade. He graduated in 1965, joined the Communist Party and became a professional soldier.
After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Mladic became chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Serbs in Bosnia, supported by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
As military commander, Mladić was the main architect of a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign, directly overseeing widespread and indiscriminate killings, deportations and forced transfers of civilians.
Mladic was convicted of many atrocities, but two of his crimes, the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, have become synonymous with the terror he inflicted on Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the war.
Under his command, Bosnian Serb forces besieged the city of Sarajevo from high ground in 1992. For two years they trapped the population in the valley below and conducted frequent shelling and sniper attacks against civilians. More than 10,000 people died during the siege, including many children.
In July 1995, Mladic spearheaded an attack on the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, which had been designated a “safe place” by the United Nations. The massacre was the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, with more than 7,000 Muslims, mostly men and boys, massacred within days.
Riyadh described the events in Srebrenica as “a true hellscape written in the darkest pages of human history”.
“Thousands of people were executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of people were buried alive, men and women were mutilated and slaughtered, children were killed in front of their mothers, grandfathers were forced to eat the livers of their grandchildren,” the judge said when Mladic’s indictment was announced.
Mladic was indicted by the ICTY in November 1995, but evaded justice for 16 years.
He first sought refuge in Belgrade, where he lived under Milosevic’s protection. After the former Serbian president was arrested in 2001, Mladic went into hiding from authorities for another 10 years.
He was finally arrested in Serbia in May 2011 and extradited to The Hague shortly after. His trial lasted more than four years and was in many ways the culmination of the ICTY’s work. This was the court’s last major case and included harrowing testimony from hundreds of witnesses.
Mladic showed little remorse during the trial and denied any responsibility. He blamed the acts for which he was on trial on his subordinates who carried out his orders.
In closing arguments, ICTY prosecutor Alan Teager described Mladic as a “master of life and death.”
“The time has come for General Mladic to be held accountable for his crimes against each of his victims and the communities he destroyed,” Teeger said. “No one can fathom the amount of suffering that Ratko Mladic is responsible for.”
This story has been updated.
