(Repeats story first published on May 15, text unchanged)
* Accused of killing thousands in Srebrenica and Sarajevo
* Hero to Serb nationalists, “Balkan Butcher” to victims
* Sometimes arrogant, sometimes befuddled, always defiant
By Douglas Hamilton
May 15 (Reuters) – There is something shocking about Ratko
Mladic in court. Old and infirm, he is a shadow of the strutting
Bosnian Serb general who once struck fear into the hearts of
Muslims and Croats.
But physical weakness has not dimmed his belief in himself
or his cause, or prompted a flicker of remorse over the war
crimes for which he goes on trial in The Hague on Wednesday.
“The whole world knows who I am,” he told a pre-trial
hearing last year. “I am General Ratko Mladic. I defended my
people, my country … now I am defending myself.”
Now 70, Mladic faces a charge of genocide for the slaughter
of 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in
July 1995, and the pitiless 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo.
It has taken 17 years to bring him to trial at the
International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, a
testament to the loyalty he inspired among Serbs and the power
of their nationalist cause.
But as Serbia’s goal of integration with Europe overtook its
defiance, he lost his comfortable protection. By the end he was
reduced to sheltering, penniless and sick, in a cousin’s
farmhouse.
The son of a World War Two partisan fighter killed in 1945,
Mladic was an officer in the old communist Yugoslav Federal Army
(JNA) when Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in 1991.
When Serbs rose up in 1992 against Bosnia’s Muslim-led
secession, he was picked to command the army that swiftly
overran 70 percent of the country. It was a model of
ruthlessness, daring and brutality in the Serb warrior tradition
once prized in the life-or-death struggle against Nazi Germany.
SOLDIER-TO-SOLDIER
But NATO officers who dealt soldier-to-soldier with Mladic
when U.N. evenhandedness was official policy later came to
regret shaking the hand of the “Butcher of the Balkans”.
Bloodthirsty paramilitaries joined in the campaign,
murdering, raping and mutilating. Dozens of towns were besieged
with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA, and villages
were burned down as 22,000 troops of the U.N. Protection Force
stood by more or less helplessly, with orders not to take sides.
Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the enclave of
Srebrenica, showing him bronzed and fit at 53, extolling his
“lads” and haranguing the hapless Dutch U.N. peacekeepers who
took his soldier’s word that the inhabitants would be safe.
Instead they were systematically executed in a massacre that
took several days.
Men and boys were separated from the women, stripped of
identification, then shot. The dead were bulldozed into mass
graves, then later dug up with excavators and hauled away in
trucks to be better hidden from the world, in dozens of remote
mass graves.
Over 6,600 victims have since been identified by DNA tests.
It was the horrific culmination of a 3-1/2-year conflict in
which the beefy general pounded the besieged city of Sarajevo
daily with artillery, tanks, mortars and machineguns, killing
over 11,000, until sports fields overflowed with graves.
The alleged goal was “ethnic cleansing” – the forcible
extermination or expulsion of Muslims, Croats and other
non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.
Prosecutors say it was a conspiracy in which Mladic and
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic were aided, armed and
abetted by the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
Only a combination of Western pressure and covert American
arms and training for Croats and Muslims turned the tide in 1995
against Mladic’s army, ultimately deprived of equipment and fuel
supplies from Serbia. NATO air strikes did the rest.
OLD AND FRAIL
Today, Mladic today looks nothing like the burly general in
camouflage who ruffled the hair of a Srebrenica boy that July.
He seems older than his 70 years and by his own account
feels like a frail old man. In his few court appearances since
his capture and extradition a year ago, he has wavered between
maudlin self-pity, smiling defiance and vague distraction.
“I am very sick man,” Mladic pleaded to the court last July.
But he ended with a gruff dismissal of assistance, saying he did
not need to be helped like a blind cripple.
Only half his time at large was spent as a hunted fugitive.
Even after Milosevic fell in 2000, he stayed on in a
Belgrade apartment until 2002.
Despite Western urging, the reformists ruling Serbia did not
dare to move against a man who was still a hero to a determined
core of aggressive Serb nationalists.
Mladic received treatment at a top military hospital.
Sporadic sightings put him at a Belgrade horse race or a soccer
game. In 2004, NATO said he had toasted hard-drinking old
comrades at his former HQ bunker in Han Pijesak, Bosnia.
But pressure was now piled on Serbia’s pro-European Boris
Tadic to prove it was serious about confronting war crimes as
the price for starting the process of joining the European
Union.
When two sentries at an army complex in Belgrade were
mysteriously shot dead in October 2004, newspapers said they had
been silenced by diehards because they had seen Mladic. After
this his support began to dry up, and he went underground.
When he was finally arrested, he put up no resistance. His
right arm was lame, the apparent result of an untreated stroke.
At the tribunal he has appeared by turns arrogant and senile.
BOOKS AND TELEVISION
Yet life at the detention centre seems to have helped his
condition. Internees have a gym, art rooms, tennis and
basketball courts, a kitchen, phone booths, television, books
and newspapers, and can order food from a Balkan shop.
Birthdays and religious holidays are celebrated. Men who
were sworn enemies in the 1990s now sit down at the same table.
In court last year, Mladic smiled as a judge read out
charges that his men had taken 200 U.N. peacekeepers hostage as
human shields in 1994 to thwart NATO bombing, a notorious
exploit.
But he is not as articulate as his mentors Karadzic and
Milosevic, who made long self-justifying speeches at their
trials. Last July he was ejected from court for heckling the
judge who read out a charge of genocide and entered a not-guilty
plea on his behalf.
“No, no, no!” he shouted. “Don’t read it to me, not a single
word.”
Milosevic died in detention on March 11, 2006, a few months
before a verdict in his trial for genocide and other war crimes
in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Karadzic is still on trial.
The trial of Mladic may serve justice by exposing the truth
about the Bosnia war, but reconciliation in Bosnia is far off.
The U.S.-brokered Dayton accords of 1995 stopped the
bloodshed, dividing Bosnia into a Muslim-Croat federation and a
Serb Republic. But they have not healed ethnic divisions or
prevented the steady rise of Bosnian Serb separatism.
Most Bosnian Serbs are convinced that Mladic is innocent. Or
they say that even if he did commit atrocities, he was no worse
than enemy commanders, and he was defending the Serb people. If
he is found guilty, it will only prove their conviction that the
Hague tribunal is utterly biased against Serbs.
“I am very old man and I am close to my end as far as my
health is concerned, and I am not important,” Mladic told the
tribunal last year. “It matters what kind of legacy I will leave
behind, among my people.”
(Additional reporting by Ivana Sekularac, Sara Webb, Damir
Sagolj; Writing by Douglas Hamilton; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
