Reflections on the Death of Ratko Mladić, Butcher of Bosnia | BBC News
War criminal Ratko Mladić, the former military leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the Yugoslav wars, died yesterday in prison at the Hague. BBC news put out an eight minute video detailing who he was, his crimes, and what happened at his trials. It’s worth the watch– to remember the not-so-distant past, and to reflect on the not-so-different now.
The “Butcher of Bosnia” lived to 84 years and was the perpetrator of many war crimes and crimes against humanity– the most infamous of which was the killing of over 8,000 Bosniak boys and men in Srebrenica in July, 1995, the worst atrocity in Europe since the WW2. Also notable was his orchestration of the nearly four-year seige of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern war.
Mladić was a middle-ranking officer in 1991 when Yugoslavia disintegrated and the vacuum was filled by conflict. His fanatical nationalism pushed him, in three years, to the leadership of a Serb army intent on establishing an ethnic Serb state in Croatian and Bosnian lands. It was over these three years that he gained his reputation as the Butcher through ruthless targeting of non-Serbs, and it was this targeting for which his forces conceived their own name that has stuck: ethnic cleansing.
As stories filter out from Bucha and Mariopul, one has to see European parallels between those days and the cleansing nature of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thousands of civilians in that conflict have been victims of crimes at the hands of Russian soldiers that could and should, someday– when there’s an enduring peace and evidence can be collected– be deemed crimes of war.
Could the orchestrator of those crimes, the current occupant of the Kremlin, see the same fate as Mladić in the future? It would require that many things align, not the least of which a change in government and a Russian leadership willing to extradite him. Regardless, there are many who hope to see him experience the same fate.
Here’s the original video: “Ratko Mladić: the war criminal nicknamed “Butcher of Bosnia” dies in UN Prison | BBC News.”
