Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday accused of carrying out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing and Europe’s worst massacre since World War II.
Mladic’s trial opened at the Yugoslav war crimes court in The Hague, also watched in a live broadcast in Sarajevo by widows and other relatives of victims of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica where almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were allegedly murdered by Mladic’s forces.
“Ratko Mladic assumed the mantle of the criminal goal of ethnically cleansing Bosnia,” prosecutor Dermot Groome told International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Now 70, Mladic has been indicted on 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the Balkan country’s brutal 1992-95 war that killed 100,000 people and left 2.2 million homeless.
“The prosecution will present evidence that will show without reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said. Mladic, dressed in a dark grey suit and patterned tie, sarcastically applauded judges as they entered the courtroom, but was not asked to speak during the hearing.
He had pleaded not guilty to the charges at an earlier court hearing last June. He faces life imprisonment if convicted. Outside the court, a group of 25 women belonging to the “Mothers of Srebrenica” organisation representing widows and victims of the Srebrenica massacre, held a demonstration.
In Sarajevo, 63-year-old Fatima Mujic, all of whose male relatives were killed in Srebrenica, said: “Ratko Mladic ripped out our hearts.”
“But God sees everything and I believe in his judgement only,” she added.
Mujic lost her three sons, husband, two brothers and father to Bosnian Serb military forces under Mladic’s command when the eastern Bosnian town, a UN protected enclave at the time, was overrun on July 11, 1995.
In his opening address, the prosecutor displayed population maps showing the ethnic distribution in Bosnia before and after the war, explaining how mixed or predominantly Muslim municipalities became exclusively Serbian after a campaign of ethnic cleansing he said was one of Mladic’s “strategic objectives”. Groome said the very first objective was to “separate the Serbs from the other two national communities” — Bosnians and Croats.
“Thousands of families were forced from their land,” Groome added, as he told the court how groups of non-Serbs were executed and others forced to jump from a bridge by soldiers under Mladic’s command.
