Shadow of Mladic persists in Bosnia

The shadow Ratko Mladic cast over Bosnia persists nearly 20 years after he led Serb military forces in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.

Bosnia’s Serbs revere him for his devotion to their failed cause, its Muslims are repulsed by his cruelty, and the soul of the capital they once shared peacefully has been scorched forever.

Sarajevo and all of Bosnia are a sadder place – dysfunctional, rent by hatreds sown during the war that will last for generations.

Mr Mladic has loomed large from the first artillery barrage his forces directed at Sarajevo’s citizens from the hills above the city, on a sunny day in April 1992.

Before the war, Sarajevo’s live-and-let-live attitude had exemplified the ideal of what was then Yugoslavia. Serb, Croat and Bosniak interacted from cradle to grave.

They intermarried – according to the 1991 census a year before the war began, 51 per cent of Sarajevo’s marriages were mixed – and celebrated each others’ birthdays and jointly mourned at funerals.

No place was off limits to anyone, and the city was abuzz with multi-ethnic art, music and literature that made it the cultural capital of Yugoslavia.

The city remained tolerant even as the country began to fray along ethnic lines, but by early 1992, both Bosnia, one of Yugoslavia’s former republics, and its capital were pulled into the vortex.

Sarajevo’s civilians huddled in basements to escape Mr Mladic’s artillery as he revelled in his power. “Burn their brains,” he bellowed as his men targeted the nearly-defenceless city from the hills above.

At the war’s end three years later, Sarajevo was a burned-out shell.

For most Muslim Bosniaks, Mladic shares the blame along with Slobodan Milosevic, the late Yugoslav strongman, and Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader now being tried by the United Nations war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

Bakir Izetbegovic, the son of war-time Bosniak leader Alija Izetbegovic, described Mr Mladic as a coward who massacred thousands but had “no courage to face charges”.

Many Bosnian Serbs, however, were dismayed by the capture of Mladic, the man they once hoped would accomplish their dream of secession from Bosnia and union with neighbouring Serbia.

Now Bosnia is split into a Serb republic that still seeks independence – a goal that helped spark the war – and a Bosniak-Croat entity opposed to a split.

“Most of the (Bosnian) Serbs support Mladic and perhaps half of Serbia does too,” declared Tijo Mladic, Mr Mladic’s first cousin from the village of Bozanovici in eastern Bosnia where Mr Mladic was born.

Backed by the government in Belgrade, and supported internationally by Russia out of a sense of historical grievance, Bosnian Serbs often were more aggressively nationalist than their cousins in Serbia itself.

At the same time, they played a cynical game of talking about peace, lifting and then reimposing the blockage of Muslim towns, and acting the victim.

Many Bosnian Serb leaders saw the war as a harsh but necessary means to achieve their goals. But barrel-chested Mr Mladic, a former Yugoslav army officer, appeared to relish in using the conflict as a stage for bloody excesses – including, most infamously, the taking of Srebrenica. Just hours before ordering the massacre of thousands of men, women and children at the Bosnian town in July 1995, Mr Mladic handed out sweets to the town’s children. He even patted one on the head. Television images of that scene documented his cynicism to the world.

Mr Mladic’s arrest was “too long coming”, said retired US admiral Leighton Smith, who as commander of Allied Forces Southern Europe led implementation of the Nato no-fly zone over Bosnia and the bombing campaign.

“I never met him, and I never referred to him as ‘general’ because I thought he was a butcher and an animal.”

But Mr Mladic was idolised by his troops – and Bosnian Serbs in general who feted him as a hero born to save the Serbs from Bosniak domination.

To his Bosniak victims, he showed no compassion, referring to them as Turks because of their Muslim heritage.

Under his command, villages were “cleansed” of Croats and Muslims; rape became a weapon of war; neighbours burned neighbours’ houses and farms; internment camps that recalled the concentration camps of the Nazis reappeared on the European landscape.

Serbs, too suffered. Their villages were also ethnically cleansed, and their women raped by an enemy that was sometimes Bosniak, sometimes Bosnian Croat.

Still, in terms of numbers in a war that left 110,000 dead and 10,000 still missing, the main victims were the Bosniaks targeted in Sarajevo, Srebrenica and elsewhere by Mr Mladic and his loyalists with a criminal energy that sometimes defied description.

Many of his soldiers pledged to follow him to the death. In a macabre pilgrimage, young men from Serbia drove for hours from Belgrade at weekends to man guns commanded by Mr Mladic on a mountain redoubt in Pale.

In the valley under those hills, Sarajevans suffered for days, weeks – then months and years. Food became scarce, then drinking water and petrol. Anaesthetics ran out and the hospital began amputating limbs mangled by shrapnel without them.

Old women bent by the load of water canisters on their backs were easy pickings for Mr Mladic’s snipers. Journalists, aid workers and other outsiders caught up in the war by their jobs also became targets.