General Ratko Mladic’s ruthlessness was legendary: “Burn their brains!” he once bellowed as his men pounded Sarajevo with artillery fire.
So was his arrogance: He nicknamed himself “God,” and kept goats which he was said to have named after Western leaders he despised.
General Mladic, the wartime Bosnian Serb military chief wanted for genocide for Europe’s worst massacre of civilians since the World War II, was the UN war crimes tribunal’s No. 1 co-fugitive with his partner in crime, Radovan Karadzic.
Mr Mladic, 69, had eluded capture since he was indicted by the tribunal in 1995.
But his days as a fugitive were numbered after Serbian security forces captured Karadzic on July 21, 2008, in Belgrade. Today, Serbia’s President announced that Mladic is in custody.
Known for personally leading his troops in the 1995 Serb onslaught against the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica – where thousands of Muslim men and boys were killed – Mladic was indicted for genocide against the Bosnian town’s population.
Just hours before the massacre, Mr Mladic handed out sweets to Muslim children rounded up at the town’s square and assured them that all would be fine – even patting one child on the head. That sinister image is forever imprinted in the minds of Srebrenica survivors.
Born on March 12, 1942, in the south-eastern Bosnian village of Bozinovci, Mladic graduated from Belgrade’s prestigious military academy and joined the Yugoslav Communists in 1965.
Embarking on an army career when Yugoslavia was a six-state federation, Mr Mladic rose steadily through the military ranks, making general before the country’s break-up in 1991.
At the start of the Balkan bloodbath, he was in Croatia leading Yugoslav troops in Knin and was believed to have played a crucial role in the army bombardment of the coastal city of Zadar. A year later, he assumed command of the Yugoslav Army’s 2nd Military District, which effectively became the Bosnian Serb army.
Appointed in 1992 by Mr Karadzic, Mr Mladic led the Bosnian Serb army until the Dayton accords brought peace to Bosnia in 1995.
Among his men, Mr Mladic commanded fierce devotion – many Bosnian Serb soldiers pledged to follow him to the death – and adoration bordering on the pathological.
As military leaderships go, his was omnipresent, from front-line trenches to chess games on high-altitude outlooks. He was known for ordering press-ups as a prelude to battle, and he enjoyed reviewing pompous military parades and rubbing shoulders with UN commanders in Bosnia.
Obsessed with his nation’s history, Mladic saw Bosnia’s war – which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced another 1.8 million – as a chance for revenge against 500 years of Turkish-Ottoman occupation of Serbia. He viewed Bosnian Muslims as Turks and called them that as an insult.
Convinced of the power of his army, he was known for telling his soldiers: “When I give you guarantees, it’s as if they are given by God.”
Once, asking air traffic control to clear the way for his helicopter to land, he declared: “Here speaks Ratko Mladic – the Serbian God.”
Sarajevans never forgot his commands to the Serb gunmen pounding the Bosnian capital in early 1992. Mr Mladic issued his orders through a military radio system, not bothering to scramble his words, which would be picked up, taped and broadcast on television the next day.“Burn their brains!” he ordered as his gunners trained their artillery on one suburb.
Mr Mladic’s short temper only added to his popularity among Bosnian Serbs, who appeared to like him all the more when the general reportedly fell out with Mr Karadzic in 1994.
With Mr Karadzic, Mr Mladic shares a tribunal indictment for genocide linked to the Srebrenica massacre, as well as numerous counts of crimes against humanity. The allegations include the taking of peacekeepers as hostages, the destruction of sacred places, the torture of captured civilians and the wanton destruction of private property. During the shelling of Sarajevo, he was said to have commanded: “Scorch and destroy!” He denied ever giving such an order. The US government offered $5 million for information leading to Mr Mladic’s arrest or conviction in any country.
He was dismissed from his post in December 1996 by Biljana Plavsic, then President of the Bosnian Serb republic. In firing Mr Mladic and his entire general staff, Ms Plavsic cited their indictments for war crimes. But her main aim was to sever links with the late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, with whom Mr Mladic was close.
Evading arrest, Mr Mladic began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and designed to withstand a nuclear attack. With his wife, Bosa, Mr Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats. His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.
Before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen in public – sometimes with his guards, sometimes without them.
The charges
Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader captured in Serbia on Wednesday, faces charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the bloody 1992-95 Bosnian war.
The 69-year-old wartime commander of the Bosnian Serb army had been on the run since he was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1995.
He was named on the same indictment sheet as Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested in July 2008.
The indictment against Mr Mladic details his role the 1992-95 war in Bosnia, the bloodiest of the conflicts in the Balkans following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s which left more than 200,000 people dead.
The document details how Mr Mladic went from being a commander in the Yugoslav army in 1991 to heading the staff of the Bosnian Serb army shortly after the Bosnian Serbs proclaimed their own republic inside Bosnia.
In particular the indictment highlights Mr Mladic’s alleged responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo, the campaign of “ethnic cleansing” throughout Bosnia, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and holding dozens of UN peacekeepers hostage.
He is charged with being a member of a criminal enterprise whose objective was “the elimination or permanent removal, by force or other means, of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb inhabitants from large areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina through the commission of crimes”.
The two counts of genocide, the gravest of war crimes, focus on the treatment of Bosnian Muslims and specifically mention the establishment of camps and detention centres for them and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of nearly 8,000.
Thousands of people were held in horrific living conditions in the camps run by Bosnian Serbs at the start of the 1992-95 war. In the Prijedor area alone more than 1,500 people died in the notorious camps of Omarska, Trnopolje and Keraterm.
Conditions in the camps were “calculated to bring about physical destruction”, detainees were subjected to “torture, sexual violence and beatings” and faced “inhumane living conditions”, the prosecution has said.
In July 1995 Serb troops over-ran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and killed nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the deadliest single bloodbath in Europe since World War II.
It is the only episode in the bloody Bosnian war to be officially ruled to have been a genocide by both the ICTY and the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice.
The document also singles out the 44-month siege of Sarajevo by forces under Mr Mladic’s control which “used artillery and mortar shelling and sniping to target civilian areas of Sarajevo... killing and wounding civilians and thereby also inflicting terror” upon the population of the Bosnian capital.
In all, Mr Mladic faces 15 charges also including persecutions, extermination and murder, deportation, inhumane acts, unlawfully inflicting terror on civilians and taking of hostages.
He is not only charged with having personally “planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of these crimes” but also for being responsible for the atrocities committed by Bosnian Serb troops subordinate to him which he failed to prevent or punish for.