Image Courtesy:arabnews.com
A United Nations court called the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has dismissed the final appeal filed by former Boanian Serb Commander Ratko Mladić, and he will spend the rest of his life in prison. The 78-year-old Mladić is nicknamed the “butcher of Bosnia” and had 10 convictions against him including extermination, forcible transfers, terror, hostage-taking and unlawful attacks on civilians. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is a first such tribunal since Nuremberg.
Mladić will now join his one-time political master, the former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadžić, in serving a life sentence as a key architect of the ethnic cleansing and civil war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, reported The Guardian.
The judgement stated that Mladić played an instrumental role in the attempts to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina between May 1992 and November 1995 by spreading terror among the civilian population through sniping and shelling. He was also part of a criminal enterprise that sought to eliminate Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and was responsible for deaths of 8,000 men and boys who were slaughtered in mass executions. He also gave orders to take UN personnel as hostages and to be put in strategic military locations to prevent NATO from launching airstrikes.
Serge Brammertz, the former chief prosecutor at The Hague war crimes tribunal, who oversaw the capture of Mladić told The Guardian that Mladic’s name should be consigned to the list of history’s most depraved and barbarous figures.
However, The Guardian’s report paints a bleak picture of present day Bosnia where nationalism is rampant and denial of all these crimes against humanity is the norm amongst Bosnian Serbs who view Mladic as a hero.
The report also recounted the harrowing and heart wrenching accounts by one of the several survivors Munira Subašić, a Bosnian Muslim. In July 1995, her 17-year-old son was pulled away from her and put on a bus and later some of his remains were found, while her husband’s remains were found in a morgue where it had remained unidentified for 8 years.
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