Ratko Mladic

[Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1]

Ratko Mladic files appeal against Hague extradition

 

 

Former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic has filed an appeal against his extradition to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague. His family says Gen Mladic is too sick to travel, but the Serbian government is expected to reject the appeal. Gen Mladic is accused of committing war crimes during the Bosnian war, including the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 7,500 Muslim men and boys. Gen Mladic was seized last Thursday in Lazarevo village, north of Belgrade. On Sunday, thousands of people rallied in Belgrade against his arrest. The demonstrators hailed the general as a Serbian national hero. About 100 people were arrested during clashes with police in the Serbian capital.

 

Delaying tactic?

 

Gen Mladic's lawyer, Milos Saljic, confirmed he had posted the appeal papers to Serbia's war crimes court from a postbox in Belgrade. The court should receive the appeal on Tuesday and can then review it. Serbian prosecutors labelled the move a delaying tactic. Despite a decision by a Belgrade court that Gen Mladic was fit enough to be handed over to the UN court, Mr Saljic said he would request another independent medical examination, saying his client's health had deteriorated since his arrest.

 

"I don't think the trial will take place. He will not live to the start of the trial," said Mr Saljic.

 

It could take up to three days for the ministry of justice to decide on the appeal, but the BBC's Mark Lowen in Belgrade says it is likely to be rejected earlier, with Serbia's deputy war crimes prosecutor already dismissing the claim of ill-health as a delaying tactic.

 

The BBC's Duncan Kennedy says Sunday's protest was held by a few thousand people for whom Gen Mladic remains a hero

 

"My impression is that he is acting in a very composed manner," said the prosecutor, Bruno Vekaric. "As far as his mental state is concerned, believe me, he looks more normal than many others."

 

He also dismissed as ungrounded media reports that Gen Mladic had hearing difficulties and that his right arm was paralysed - possibly as a result of a stroke.

 

'Treason'

 

The government will hope Gen Mladic's departure will quell any further demonstrations by his supporters, adds our correspondent. The Hague tribunal says it will not specify on which day Gen Mladic will arrive, but our correspondent says there is speculation he could be sent on a night-time flight, without prior warning. Sunday's protests saw some 7,000 supporters of Gen Mladic rallying in central Belgrade to hear speeches from nationalist politicians and decry Mr Mladic's arrest. Some in Serbia consider Gen Mladic a hero and resent the pro-Western government of President Boris Tadic for arresting him and planning to turn him over to The Hague. Gen Mladic's arrest is considered crucial to Serbia's bid to join the European Union. He evaded capture for 16 years after the end of the Bosnian conflict - just one of the ethnic wars unleashed in the 1990s by the break up of Yugoslavia.

 

On Sunday, Gen Mladic's son, Darko, said that despite the tribunal's indictment, his father had told him he was not responsible for the killings in Srebrenica, committed after his troops overran the town.

 

"He said that whatever was done in Srebrenica, he had nothing to do with it," he told journalists, after visiting his father.

 

Reconciliation hopes

 

Gen Mladic was seized early last Thursday morning Lazarevo, about 80km (50 miles) north of the capital. Following the arrest of Radovan Karadzic in 2008, Gen Mladic had become the most prominent Bosnian war crimes suspect still at large. He was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995 for genocide over the killings that July at Srebrenica - the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II - and other alleged crimes. Having lived freely in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001. President Tadic has said the arrest brought the country and the region closer to reconciliation, and opened the doors to EU membership for Serbia.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13592285

 

There's a slideshow on the war in Yugoslavia and a video in the link.

 

 

Mladic the Monster

Our failure to respond to the Serbian atrocities prolonged the slaughter.

By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, May 30, 2011, at 12:48 PM ET

 

I suppose it is possible that the arrest of Gen. Ratko Mladic is as undramatic and uncomplicated as it seems and that in recent years he had been off the active list and gradually became a mumbling old derelict with a rather nasty line in veterans' reminiscences. His demands would probably have been modest and few: the odd glass of slivovitz in company with a sympathetic priest (it's usually the Serbian Orthodox Church that operates the support and counseling network for burned-out or wanted war criminals) and an occasional hunting or skiing trip. Though there is something faintly satisfying about this clichéd outcome—the figure of energetic evil reduced to a husk of exhausted banality—there is also something repellent about it.

 

As a confused old pensioner or retiree, Mladic is in danger of arousing local sympathy in rather the same way as John Demjanjuk did, but of doing so within a few years of the original atrocities and not several decades. Moreover, Mladic was a director and organizer of the mass slaughters at Srebrenica and Zepa (as of the obscene bombardment of the open city of Sarajevo), and not a mere follower of orders. The new and allegedly reformist Serbian government bears some responsibility for this moment of moral nullity and confusion, since it seems to regard the arrest of Mladic and his political boss Radovan Karadzic as little more than an episode in the warming of Belgrade's relations with the European Union. You don't have to be a practicing Serbo-chauvinist to find something a bit trivial and sordid in that calculation. (And what if it doesn't prove possible to stretch the increasingly inelastic Eurozone to accommodate Serbia's pressing needs and add them to those of Greece and Ireland? A possible hostage to fortune here.)

 

There's another deplorable consequence to the presentation of Mladic as scruffy and pathetic. It will become almost impossible for people much younger than I am to understand what a colossal figure he used to represent. I use the last eight words very carefully, because at the time I considered him a vastly overrated individual, credited with political and military abilities that he did not, in fact, possess. But if you tried, in Washington in the early Clinton years, to suggest that Mladic's blitzing of Sarajevo ought to be met with a military response, this is what you would get. It was a sort of large-print version of the "Arab street," rewritten so as to replace Arab or Muslim with Orthodox or Russian:

 

If we fire on Serb positions, they will abandon all restraint and obliterate Sarajevo. … The Yugoslav National Army will go on the offensive nationwide. Milosevic will appeal to Moscow for weapons and diplomatic support and will get them. … You have to remember that Tito's wartime partisans pinned down 20 of Hitler's divisions …

 

On and on it went, not always with all of these points made in one burst (though I do recall Defense Secretary Les Aspin managing to compress them pretty neatly, not to say hysterically). Of course, in the end, the Mladic forces did what racial and religious fanatics always do and went too far. At that point, there had to be some kind of Western punitive retaliation. And then it turned out that the Serbian gunmen were not "crack" forces or "elite" troops at all, but a sordid militia with an unbroken record of victory against civilians. And, though Russian demagogues like Vladimir Zhirinovsky did turn up in Serb-occupied Bosnia, Russia showed little inclination to stake much on its sentimental history as Mother of the Slavs.

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Even after the exposure of these and other chronic weaknesses, the Serbian leaders were offered concession after concession at Dayton and over Kosovo, until the entire myth was dissipated by Milosevic's insane attempt to extend ethnic cleansing into Albania and Macedonia. By the time it was over, the iron logic of European fascism had triumphed again, as it had after 1945, and large Serbian minorities in Krajina and Kosovo were being cleansed from places where they had long residence and deep roots. If anyone should have been agitating for the arrest and arraignment of Mladic over the past few years, surely it should have been the Serbian rank and file?

 

At times like this, we are always reliably reminded of what John Quincy Adams said about the risk to the United States of going "abroad in search of monsters to destroy." The monstrous character of Mladic and his movement needed no exaggeration. To this day, a lot of people do not understand how much misery and chaos and suffering it purposely inflicted. But the monstrous nature of his power and reach was paradoxically and enormously exaggerated—not by those who wanted to confront it, but by those who did not! This meant that the whole nightmare was needlessly prolonged and the expense of concluding it greatly increased. On whatever basis the post-Tito Yugoslavia was to be reconstituted, there was one that was utterly impossible as well as unthinkable: a "Greater Serbia," whereby smaller republics and their populations were forcibly cut to fit the requirements of a dictatorial tailoring. It will one day seem incredible that the NATO powers did not see this right away and continued to treat Slobodan Milosevic as a "partner in peace," thus opening the road that led straight to Srebrenica and the murder of people ostensibly under our protection.

 

Srebrenica is one of the best-documented atrocities in modern history. We have everything, from real-time satellite surveillance (shamefully available to the United States even as the butchery was going on) to film and video taken by the perpetrators, including Mladic himself. The production of this material in court will, one hopes, wipe any potential grin from his face and destroy the propaganda image of the simple patriotic man at arms. Whatever our policy on monsters abroad may turn out to be, at least we should be able to recognize one when we see one.

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2295807/

[Rob W 0]

nasty piece of work - good that he's been caught

[ohhh_yeah 2786]

 

 

[ewerk 26515]

And I had a tenner on an acquittal.

[Meenzer 14085]

I had over 3.5 genocides

[Anorthernsoul 1221]

Remember watching a documentary on the Bosnian war, he was a sick cunt that is for sure.