The Butcher of Bosnia

Bosnia is a country that has a vast history linked to wars, either being the reason to start a war or has been a country that was involved in wars where millions of lives were lost. On 28 June 1914, shots were fired by a young Bosnian Serb that went by the name Gavrilo Princep which eventually went on to ignite a war popularly referred to today as the First World War.

78 years later, the Bosnian Muslims and Croats voted for independence in a referendum boycotted against by the Bosnian Serbs. So the country was made a war zone, divided as the Bosnian Serbs on one side and the Bosnian Muslims and Croats on the other. The leader of the Bosnian Serbs went on to organise an ethnic cleansing, a campaign where tens of thousands of individuals were brutally massacred and hundreds of thousands displaced. This leader, responsible, showed the resemblance of a dictator that terrorized the world in the early ’40s one could say they possessed similar ideals of governance and it is no coincidence that both would go down in history as accountable for two of the world’s largest genocides. If it was Adolf Hitler for the Germans, it was a man named Ratko Mladic for the Bosnians. Mladic wanted his country free of the occupation of the Bosniaks, which was in their control for nearly 5 centuries. He saw an opportunity in the war to finally eliminate the Bosniaks, to restore the control over Bosnia to the Bosnian Serbs. Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia, ironically was the place that witnessed the start of the First World War as well as the massacre and displacement of tens of thousands of individuals. Srebrenica, a small salt mining town, 80km north of Sarajevo, played victim to the mass genocide that Mladic had initiated. This town was a Bosniak enclave under UN protection when in July 1995, it was seized by Mladic and his army who rounded up thousands of men and boys that were aged between 12 and 77. What happened after was sheer violence, Mladic’s men opened fire on thousands of innocent civilians, it was truly a blood bath. The war ended later that year by the time of which a UN war crimes tribunal indicted Mladic on two counts of genocide for the Sarajevo siege and Srebrenica massacre. Mladic was on the run. Even as a fugitive, Mladic never backed down. He walked as a “free man” because behind him was the backing of the then Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic. However, like not all good things last forever, Mladic was living a life of risk, when President Milosevic was removed from power. He was soon caught red-handed by the police. 26 May 2011, was D-Day for Mladic when the police surrounded his house and arrested him. Mladic at that time was 69 and had already suffered from a stroke which had left his right arm paralysed. Even when he was arrested, his arrogance paved the path for him to say “I could have killed 10 of you if I wanted to but I didn't want to” Ratko Mladic was held on trial at the Hague where he saw the world turn against him. Despite efforts of his 12 member defence team to prove his innocence, the court ruled he was a “satanic” man and he was to serve a life sentence. The UN, formed mainly as a result of the Second World War was not going to encourage a genocide that repeated the same history held concerning the Second World War. Ratko Mladic is a war hero to the Serbs and a dictator to the rest of the world. The world saw justice when Mladic was given a life sentence, to ensure something like this would never happen again, the world’s worst genocide after the holocaust. Mladic was never going to feel guilty about his crime but at the same time he was not going to be a free man anymore and that would amplify the fact that the innocent civilians did not lose their lives in vain.

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