Convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Ratko Mladić has died in a UN prison at The Hague aged 84. Mladić, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War.
The ex-military chief, who led a breakaway Bosnian Serb army following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, was behind the slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica as well as a 43-month terror campaign against civilians in Sarajevo which resulted in over 10,000 deaths. He was indicted in 1995 but evaded capture in Serbia until 2011. He was then convicted of 10 charges in 2017, including genocide, extermination, murder, and terror.
The Bosnian War left over 100,000 people dead and over one million homeless. The dead were buried in mass graves with some bodies later dug up and moved to remote areas in a bid to hide evidence of the killings.
Mladić was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) after being found to be the mastermind before the ethnic cleanising against Bosnia’s non-Serb population in the 1990s. Judge Fouad Riad described the crims he oversaw as “unimaginable savagery”.
The judge added: “Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson.”
His health has declined in recent years and the former general died while serving a life sentence at the UN Detention Unit in The Hague. Mladić’s lawyers previously filed a request for an early release as his death “may occur at any time” but it was denied.
Mladić was born in Bosnia in 1942 and rose from a military officer in communist Yugoslavia to become the commander of the Bosnian Serb army. It was in this position that he orchestrated mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian War.
The war saw his forces trap Sarajevo and unleash relentless artillery shelling and sniper fire on the civilians, resulting in over 10,000 deaths, including 1,500 children. The massacre remains Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II.
He also worked with political leaders to expel Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats to create an ethnically pure Serb state. He used methods such as unlawful confinement, sexual violence and torture to do so.
