Mladic Conviction Closes Dark Chapter in Europe, but New Era of Uncertainty Looms
Sead Numanovic, a Bosnian journalist in Sarajevo who fought against Mr. Mladic’s forces, said, “This verdict, like all
the others, will not bring back sons to their mothers, dead brothers to their sisters and husbands to their wives.”
The sense of victimhood among Serbs seemed to have been trumped on Wednesday by the sentencing of Mr. Mladic, which all but confirmed Bosnian Muslim resentments
that the Serbs had succeeded in advancing their territorial ambitions by genocide.
“Regardless of the verdict that we all feel as part of the campaign against Serbs, Ratko Mladic remains a legend of the Serb nation,” said Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb autonomous region in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, which was carved out and cleansed of non-Serbs by Mr. Mladic’s wartime forces.
Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said
that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilized world.”
“Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion,” Ms. Kandic said.
With applause inside and outside the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Gen. Ratko
Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was convicted on Wednesday of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
