THE HAGUE, Netherlands: Former Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, once dubbed “The Butcher of Bosnia,” returned to a UN court Monday as his trial for genocide and war crimes in the 1990s conflict nears an end.
More than four years after Mladic’s trial opened at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, prosecutors began three days of closing arguments seeking to dismiss claims he was not responsible for some of the worst bloodshed in Europe since World War II.
Prosecutors say Mladic was in charge and took credit for a plan which “radically altered the demographic picture of the portions of Bosnia claimed by the Bosnian Serbs.”
“What happened in municipality after municipality was not an unintended effect of the military campaign, but its very purpose,” prosecutor Alan Tieger told the court.
“Ethnic cleansing does not appear to be the consequence of the military campaign, but its goal.”
Mladic, 74, has denied 11 charges including two of genocide, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the bloody 1992-95 Bosnian conflict in which more than 100,000 people died and 2.2 million others were left homeless.
Dressed in a grey suit and a blue and white tie, Mladic appeared somber Monday as the hearings opened. He stared for a long time at the journalists and public watching from the gallery, before turning to read his papers.
Mladic, the brutish military commander of Serb forces, came to symbolize a barbaric plan to rid multi-ethnic Bosnia of Croats and Muslims, fueled by the desire to establish an “ethnically pure” Greater Serbia.
He is notably accused of being behind the punishing 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which claimed an estimated 10,000 lives in a relentless campaign of shelling and sniping.
Mladic is also on trial over his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, who were rounded up and shot when his forces overran Dutch UN peacekeepers in the enclave.
Tieger said Mladic had sought to make the lives of Bosnian Muslims there “unbearable.”
The defense, which has repeatedly sought to have the case thrown out, will start its closing arguments on Friday. A last-minute bid on Monday to have the hearings postponed was dismissed by the three judges.
The defense has maintained that Mladic and his forces were acting in self-defense to protect against attacks by Bosnian Muslim forces, saying he is the victim of a “political” trial.
But Tieger denounced false “defense attempts to transform Mladic into a benign but ineffective officer... who was less important than the core commanders.”
The prosecution showed a video of a discussion among Serb military commanders which Tieger said proved “who was in charge, who called the shots,” arguing that Mladic was now trying to “pass off responsibility for what he once bragged about.”
Families of the victims are anxiously awaiting the outcome of the case but a verdict is not expected until 2017.
It is the last case from the former Yugoslavia being heard before the ICTY which was set up before the conflict ended to try perpetrators of atrocities.
Munira Subasic, who heads the Mothers of Srebrenica group, was attending the hearing on Monday on what would have been the 42nd birthday of her son who was killed in the genocide in 1995.
Subasic has said it was unfortunate that justice had been so long coming.
“Those who still believe (Radovan) Karadzic and Mladic are heroes would perhaps have thought differently today if they had been sentenced very quickly after the war,” she told AFP recently.
Karadzic, sentenced to 40 years in March, and Mladic remain the highest-profile actors from the wars to see their trials completed after former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in his UN detention cell in 2006.
Indicted in July 1995, Mladic evaded capture for some 16 years. Finally captured in May 2011, he was transferred to a UN detention center in The Hague where he remains behind bars.