Ratko Mladic Is Convicted in 1990s Slaughter of Bosnian Muslims
22, 2017
THE HAGUE — A United Nations tribunal convicted Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb former general, on Wednesday of war crimes, genocide
and crimes against humanity in the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims during the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Mr. Mladic’s diary notes a request in 1992 from Simo Drljaca, the Prijedor police chief, asking for the army’s help to remove about 5,000 bodies buried in Tomasica by "burning them or grinding them or in any other way." Mr. Mladic wrote
that he replied, "You killed them, you bury them." At the height of the ethnic cleansing campaign, in 1992, close to 45,000 were killed or missing, almost half of the 100,000 who died in the Bosnian war.
Along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, who was convicted on similar charges last year, Mr. Mladic was found to have orchestrated a campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing
that made Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation of 4.5 million at the time, the site of some of the worst atrocities of Europe’s bloody 20th century.
From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found, Mr. Mladic, 75, was the chief military organizer of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats
and other non-Serbs off their lands to cleave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.
In one telling entry on May 7, 1992, Mr. Mladic wrote
that the Bosnian Serb leadership had discussed six strategic goals, of which the first and most important was "to separate from the Croats and Muslims forever." None of the 3,500 pages directly showed his own hand in crimes and few entries exist, or survive, from the days of the Srebrenica massacre.
Along with Mr. Mladic, the other two men seen as among the main instigators of the bloodshed were Mr. Milosevic, who provided the Bosnian Serb separatists with funding, weapons
and military personnel, and Mr. Karadzic, who was convicted last year and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
