Prosecutors paint brutal Mladic picture
Print Edition
FORMER Serb commander Ratko Mladic led a relentless military campaign during the 1990s Bosnian war to ensure Muslims “vanished” from the territory, United Nations prosecutors said yesterday.
At the height of the war triggered by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, Mladic told the Bosnian Serbs they had an “opportunity to create not only any kind of state, but an all-Serbian state.”
“His concern was not that Muslims might create a state, his concern was to have them vanish completely,” prosecutor Alan Tieger told judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
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 were left homeless.
Prosecutors are wrapping up their case in three days of closing arguments in Mladic’s trial, which began in May 2012, and are likely to ask for a long jail term. The defense will follow on Friday, but a verdict is not expected until next year.
The UN prosecutors poured scorn on defense claims that Mladic was not to blame for some of the worst bloodshed in Europe since World War II — including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
Mladic had “command and control” over the Bosnian Serb forces, said another ICTY prosecutor Arthur Traldi, adding that “in carrying out the ethnic cleansing campaign, his... forces committed a constant pattern of crimes throughout Serbian-claimed territory.”
Dressed in a gray suit, Mladic appeared somber but in good health, after his trial has been dogged by his ill-health.
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.
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