SIXTEEN YEARS after the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic will be formally charged with genocide before judges in The Hague tomorrow morning.
“His arrest confirms that nobody can count on impunity for war crimes”, Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), said yesterday.
“These are crimes that shocked the conscience of the international community.” Gen Mladic was transferred from the Serbian capital, Belgrade, on Tuesday evening after a court rejected his claim that he was too ill to be extradited. He was immediately examined by doctors on arrival at Scheveningen high security jail in the Netherlands.
“Of course his health situation is a concern”, said Mr Brammertz.
“However, we have seen in the past that the tribunal takes this issue extremely seriously – and we will make sure that the necessary medical assistance will be provided.”
In March 2006, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his detention cell in Scheveningen, where he’d been held on charges of genocide and other crimes since 2001. He’d suffered from high blood pressure and a heart condition.
Mladic (69) faces charges of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and deportation for his alleged part in a plot to achieve the “elimination or permanent removal” of Muslims from large parts of Bosnia, in pursuit of a “Greater Serbia”.
He is accused of masterminding both the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst atrocity since the second World War, and the 44-month-long siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 people died – acts, Mr Brammertz said, which “symbolized the brutality of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
While the transfer of Gen Mladic was significant for the international community and for international criminal justice, the prosecutor said – it was most significant for the relatives of those who had died in crimes which “left communities broken and a nation torn apart”.
Mr Brammertz told reporters: “Sixteen years is a long time to wait for justice. It is a long time to know that someone responsible for that trauma is walking free.
“We understand why the relatives of the victims have been impatient for this day, and we recognise their courage. Without their support and involvement in our cases, this tribunal could have achieved nothing.”
It is expected that Gen Mladic will refuse to recognise the authority of the UN tribunal when he comes before the judges and is asked to confirm his identity and to enter a plea to each of the charges against him.
It is possible that he could decline to enter a plea on his first appearance, opting instead to delay his formal response by up to 30 days – pushing back the start of the pre-trial proceedings.
Asked if the trial was likely to be lengthy, Mr Brammertz replied: “It is very difficult to say how long it will last. However, the problem will not be the prosecution. We have updated our charge sheet already. It is a question of how long the defence need to prepare their case.”
Of the 161 people indicted by the ICTY only one now remains at large. Goran Hadzic, former president of the Republic of Serbian Krajina, is wanted for crimes in Vukovar in eastern Croatia, where some 2,000 people were killed.