On the day he took command of the Bosnian Serb army with a mission to divide the Bosnian republic along rigid ethnic lines, Gen. Ratko Mladic warned the Bosnian Serb political leadership that they were embarking on a vast criminal enterprise.
“We cannot cleanse nor can we have a sieve to sift so that only Serbs would stay, or that the Serbs would fall through and the rest leave,” he told the Bosnian Serbs’ newly established assembly on May 12, 1992. “People, that would be genocide.”
Yet it was Gen. Mladic, a bullnecked and ruddy-faced commander who became known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” who accelerated the campaign of murder, concentration camps and mass deportations of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, opening the bloodiest chapter in the breakup of the multiethnic Yugoslav state.
He personally directed the shelling of Sarajevo and was in command after the fall of Srebrenica, where his forces helped carry out Europe’s biggest atrocity since World War II.
The scale of the killing so horrified major powers that they set up the first international criminal court since the Nuremberg tribunal to try Gen. Mladic, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and their associates for genocide and crimes against humanity.
Gen. Mladic was found guilty of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in November 2017 and received a life sentence. His death, in a prison hospital in The Hague, was reported Thursday by Serbian state media and confirmed by a United Nations criminal tribunal. He was 84, according to official documents, although his family said he was a year younger.
Karadzic was sentenced in 2016 to 40 years in jail after being convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 3½ -year Bosnia conflict, in which Bosnian Serb forces are alleged to have killed in excess of 100,000 Muslims and Croats and driven more than 1 million to seek refuge abroad.
Milosevic, the prime mover in the dissolution of the federal Yugoslav state and who was widely viewed as the chief facilitator of the war crimes, died after a heart attack while on trial in The Hague in 2006.
Gen. Mladic’s progression from prophesier to accused perpetrator of genocide took place on the day he was named commander of the Bosnian Serb army.
A historic grudge was no doubt a motivating factor, for he often told international visitors about genocide committed against Serbs in Bosnia during World War II. He blamed Croatia’s pro-Nazi Ustasha authorities for the deaths of 40 relatives, including his father.
But objective historic factors were also at work in the Bosnian Serb revolt. A tectonic shift in European politics at the end of the Cold War brought the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites and also doomed one-party rule in independent Yugoslavia, fracturing the state along ethnic lines.
Serbs, the biggest nationality, already controlled Serbia, the biggest of the republics, and sought to dominate the successor states. But a series of wars in the 1990s would bring an end to Serb domination, with seven countries emerging from the ruins of Yugoslavia — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
In 1992, Karadzic formally stated the goal of separating Serbs from the other nationalities, and the federal Yugoslav army in Bosnia became the army of the breakaway Bosnian Serb state, the Republika Srpska, formally giving Gen. Mladic the hard power to redraw the map.
He could operate with impunity, for Europe and the United States had no stomach for intervening. Last but far from least, populism propelled him to ride the wave of ethnic hate that Karadzic and others stoked among the Serb minority.
Gen. Mladic acted in ways unthinkable for Yugoslavs of his generation, helping turn the federal army that had kept the country united into an ethnic oppressor. Bosnia, with its mix of Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Muslim faiths, and tradition of tolerance and a renown from hosting the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, became the scene of a primitive war of ethnic separation.
Unlike Karadzic, who was trained as a psychiatrist and fancied himself a great poet, Gen. Mladic was a military professional who knew the rules of war even as he broke them.
Military education
He was born in Bozanovici, Herzegovina, on an isolated rock-strewn mountain plateau about 30 miles south of Sarajevo, on March 12, 1942, according to documents, or on March 8, 1943, according to his family. His name Ratko, derived from the Serbo-Croatian word for war, reflected the times.
His father, Nedja, fought with the communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito and died when Ratko was 3 in a raid on the nearby village of Bradina.
Growing up in Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, the future general attended the military-industrial high school outside Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, and the Yugoslav military academy. He then went straight into the army.
The ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia was already underway before Gen. Mladic came on the scene. Under his command, the army provided the security framework for local officials and police to seize power, disarm Muslims and Croats, deport them en masse, detain them in concentration camps and then carry out mass executions.
An in-the-trenches leader who kept a spartan lifestyle, Gen. Mladic had piercing blue eyes and a commanding presence when he entered a room. Despite his grip on power, he tried to convince many outsiders that he was a simple soldier who sought peace.
Journalist Robert Block, who interviewed him just weeks before the Srebrenica massacre, once wrote that he was “the most charming man who ever strangled a city or pounded a village to rubble.”
Married to a woman named Bosiljka, he had a son named Darko, and a much-loved daughter, Ana, a medical student who died by suicide in 1994 at age 23, using her father’s ceremonial pistol. She was said to be distraught over reports of her father’s war crimes. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Where he achieved infamy among Bosnian Muslims and hero’s status among Serb nationalists was in the siege of Sarajevo, which began the month before his appointment, lasted 42 months and left about 13,000 residents dead.
Gen. Mladic took direct charge on May 28, 1992, the day of the first mass shelling and sniping. “Target Muslim neighborhoods where not many Serbs live,” he said in orders monitored by the Bosnian government. “Shell them so they cannot sleep, until they go out of their minds.”
The Hague tribunal said in its 2016 Karadzic ruling: “It is clear from these orders that Mladic showed no concern for the civilian population of Sarajevo nor for any civilian casualties that would result from his orders to shell the city, including Bascarsija,” the old bazaar district.
Gen. Mladic was often at odds with Karadzic, a blustery demagogue, and each tried at least once to oust the other from power. But they agreed on the goal of a Serb successor state to Bosnia, the division of Sarajevo and the removal of all Muslims from the eastern border with Serbia.
Karadzic took the lead in March 1995 with a directive ordering the army to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants” of Srebrenica. Gen. Mladic issued his own directive later that month repeating Karadzic’s instruction but leaving out the most aggressive language.
The operation began July 6 and met almost no resistance from the Bosnian defenders nor the Dutch battalion stationed in what the United Nations had declared a “safe area.”
In Srebrenica, Gen. Mladic took to the stage as the conquering hero. Strutting through the streets of the deserted town, with a Serb camera crew trailing him, he claimed a personal victory.
Days later, military and police began the execution of more than 7,000 men and boys.
The mass executions took place in an agricultural warehouse, a soccer stadium, in meadows, a gravel pit and a military farm, but Gen. Mladic left the supervision of the killings to his immediate subordinates and left for talks with international visitors in Belgrade.
Genocide charges
The Hague tribunal first indicted Gen. Mladic on war-crimes charges in July 1995, just after the Srebrenica massacre for acts committed earlier in the war, but he stayed on as commander of the Bosnian Serb army until November 1996.
Under U.S. pressure, Serbian leader Milosevic forced Karadzic to resign, then Karadzic’s successor, Biljana Plavsic, ousted Gen. Mladic, but he remained at large for 15 more years. He was forced off the Serbian army payroll in 2002.
His last five years as a fugitive were spent mostly in hiding with relatives, and he stayed well groomed, telling one of his minders that his appearance at death would be the appearance forever in the afterlife. At the time Serbian police arrested him, on May 26, 2011, he was living in an outbuilding on a cousin’s modest farm about 60 miles north of Belgrade.
He went on trial in June 2012 on 106 charges, including two separate charges of genocide.