Serbia: Executions Were Mladic’s Signature, and Downfall

Ratko Mladic

With video cameras capturing the moment, Gen. Ratko Mladic’s bodyguards handed out chocolates to Bosnian Muslim children, promising terrified women that the violence was over.

“No one will be harmed,” the Bosnian Serb commander said on July 12, 1995, gently patting a young boy on the head. “You have nothing to fear. You will all be evacuated."

As he spoke, thousands of his soldiers formed a vast cordon around the town of Srebrenica, a United Nations-protected “safe area” that had just fallen to his forces. Over the next 10 days, his soldiers hunted down, captured and summarily executed 8,000 men and boys from the town. Women were raped. And pleas for restraint from the international community were mocked.

“Over 500 victims of the Srebrenica genocide were boys under the age of 18,” said Hasan Nuhanovic, a survivor from Srebrenica whose father, mother and brother were executed by Mr. Mladic’s forces. “They were 16, 17 years old when they were executed."

The mass executions around Srebrenica became Mr. Mladic’s ghastly trademark — and his undoing. The anger and humiliation felt in Washington and in European capitals prompted the international community to act against Bosnian Serb forces after years in which Serbian forces systematically pushed Muslims and Croats out of areas they claimed belonged to the Serbian ethnic group. Within weeks, NATO airstrikes reversed the course of the war. Within months, a peace accord had been signed and Mr. Mladic was a fugitive.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Mladic supported President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia as he reignited ethnic divisions and tried to turn the majority of the country into a “Greater Serbia” dominated by ethnic Serbs. In time, fighting erupted between Yugoslavia’s 3 main ethnic groups — Orthodox Christian Serbs, Roman Catholic Croats and Muslim Bosnians — in a series of overlapping civil wars.

Srebrenica was not the general’s first act of brutality. The massacre was the culmination of years of worsening cruelty that began with the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the longest in modern warfare. The four-year bombardment killed 10,000 people, including an estimated 1,500 children. In Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic embraced a frightening form of warfare where a heavily armed military unleashed artillery and sniper fire on civilians. His forces were also accused of using systematic rape as a weapon of war.

“A professional army conducted a campaign of unrelenting violence,” war crimes prosecutors said in the opening statement of a 2003 trial of one of Mr. Mladic’s subordinates. “There was nowhere safe for a Sarajevan, not at home, at school, in a hospital, from deliberate attack.”

Born in a suburb of Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic grew up in a household haunted by the ethnic divisions that the Yugoslav dictator, Josip Broz Tito, managed to suppress for decades. Mr. Mladic’s father was killed in an attack against ethnic Croat forces allied with Nazi Germany that included some Bosnian Muslims. An infant at the time, Mr. Mladic never knew his father. German records showed that hundreds of thousands of Serbs died during the occupation, and Mr. Mladic had made it his mission to avenge them.

At news conferences, he was a silent, brooding and intimidating presence beside Radovan Karadzic. The 2 men were the leaders of Bosnia’s Serbian secessionists in their war with Croats and Muslims from 1992 to 1995. Both men said that their forces were defending Europe from a Muslim onslaught backed by wealthy Muslim nations. In truth, their opponents were poorly armed local people who had converted to Islam centuries earlier. From the first shots in April 1992 to the eventual peace accord at Dayton, Ohio, in December 1995, the war is commonly reckoned to have cost about 100,000 Bosnian lives, including 10,000 in the siege of Sarajevo.

As commander of the Yugoslav National Army’s Second Military District, headquartered in Sarajevo, Mr. Mladic was ideally placed to lead the Bosnian Serbs in their quest for secession from the newly independent Bosnia. In May 1992, Mr. Mladic ordered his forces to begin the siege of Sarajevo, cutting off all electricity, food and water to the city. United Nations airlifts allowed residents to survive, but the carnage steadily mounted.

In 1993, his forces fired a shell that killed 15 civilians at a soccer game. A month later, another shell killed 12 civilians as they waited in line for water. In 1994, a shell landed in the old city’s crowded Markale marketplace, killing 68 civilians. A year later, a second attack on the Markale market killed 34 people.

Early in the siege, an intercepted radio message caught the general ordering one of his commanders to “burn” the city.

He hitched his yearning for vengeance to a Napoleonic sense of himself, and a contempt for the United Nations forces that were trying, with faltering success, to prevent Mr. Mladic’s forces from breaking through the siege lines around Sarajevo. On one occasion in the spring of 1993, under threat from President Bill Clinton of American airstrikes if he failed to pull his troops back from a height above the city, he led reporters to the contested upland, on a ski slope that had been used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, and swept his arm across the horizon. “All of this, every bit of it, is mine,” he said. Hours later, he withdrew his troops.

Some of his threats were more personal. During a meeting of the Bosnian Serb Parliament, also in 1993, he pulled a reporter aside to send a message, he said, to a Serbian surgeon working with Croat and Muslim colleagues at the trauma center of the Kosevo Hospital in Sarajevo. It was time, he said, for the surgeon to heed demands from the Mladic forces that all Serbs in Sarajevo leave the city and join the secessionist cause. “We need her in our hospital, and she must come. She is a Serb, and it is her duty,” he said.

And what, the reporter asked, were the consequences if she did not? “You know that very well,” he said. Months later, after two attempts by Serbian snipers to kill her, and with a mounting toll of unexplained killings among Serbs remaining in the city, the surgeon fled aboard a United Nations relief flight.

In 1994, Mr. Mladic’s 23-year-old daughter, a medical student in Belgrade, committed suicide. Her death seemed only to increase his ferocity.

He grew increasingly disdainful of United Nations peacekeepers. In 1994, his forces tried to take Gorazde, a town that had been declared, along with Srebrenica, under United Nations protection. When NATO carried out airstrikes to halt Mr. Mladic’s attack, he ordered his men to take dozens of United Nations peacekeepers hostage. He eventually backed down, but the United Nations had been humiliated.

His 1995 attacks on Srebrenica brought the United Nations to one of its lowest moments of its history. Roughly 300 Dutch peacekeepers were defending the town, but his forces cut off their supplies for weeks. When he carried out a coordinated assault in July 1995, NATO jets dropped only 2 bombs on the advancing Serbian forces. Within days, the enclave of 30,000 Bosnian Muslims had fallen. After the fall of Srebrenica, Mr. Mladic mocked United Nations peacekeepers from the Netherlands and forced the commander of Dutch forces to drink a toast with him celebrating the fall of the city. And he promised his soldiers a victory that would linger in history.

While repeatedly telling Bosnian Muslim civilians that they would not be harmed, he aired his true intentions to a camera crew from Bosnian Serb television. As he strolled the center of the fallen town, he told his soldiers the time had come to avenge a massacre that the Ottoman Turks had carried out against Serbs in the area 190 years earlier. “We present this city to the Serbian people as a gift,” he said. “The time has come to take revenge."

Source: David Rohde was imprisoned by Bosnian Serb forces for 10 days in 1995 after he became the 1st reporter to discover mass graves near Srebrenica. John F. Burns covered the siege of Sarajevo; New York Times, May 27, 2011

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