Ratko Mladić

• Born: March 12, 1942 or 1943
• Place of Birth: Božanovići, Independent State of Croatia (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina)

• Place of birth: Božanovići, Independent State of Croatia (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina)

SERBIAN GENERAL AND MASS MURDERER

MAJOR OFFENSES: Crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes

ACTIVE: 1993–95

Early Life

Ratko Mladić was born in Croatia when the country was a fascist satellite of Nazi Germany. His parents fought as partisans in World War II, and the Croatian government executed his father. Mladić was reputed to be an excellent and active student and wanted to be a surgeon or teacher before deciding on a military career. He considered himself a Yugoslav until 1992, when he proclaimed himself a Serb.

Military Career

Mladić was the chief of the Serbian army in Bosnia and the right-hand man of Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the war in the 1990s. Mladić was sent to Knin, Croatia, as commander of the Ninth Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army in 1991. The army was in battle with Croatia, which had broken away from the Yugoslav confederation. On October 4, Slobodan Milošević, the Yugoslav president, promoted Mladić to major general. In April 1992, he was further promoted to lieutenant general and was assigned as chief of staff and deputy commander of the second military district in Sarajevo. He arrived there on May 9; the next day, he assumed command of the district, and two days later he took command of the main staff of the Bosnian Serbian Army, a position he would hold until December 1996. In 1994, he received a further promotion to colonel general.

As commander, Mladić immediately ordered the shelling of the civilian populace in Sarajevo. He then ordered his army to take over the towns in the Bosanski district of eastern Bosnia, forcing thousands of Croatians and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) to flee. Many were killed, and many more confined to concentration camps. In the first three months of 1993, Mladić’s troops moved into the Çerska district and Herzegovina. Thousands of Bosniaks fled to Srebrenica and Žepa, then under Muslim control.

Mladić concentrated his efforts on capturing Srebrenica as a strategic center. In 1995, with the town in his hands, he ordered the execution of seven thousand Bosniaks in the week of July 13—almost half the number killed in the whole fourteen months of the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France during 1793–94. For the rest of the year, Mladić ordered his troops to conceal the massacre by digging up the mass graves, exhuming the bodies, and reburying them in isolated locations throughout Bosnia. His actions earned him the nicknames Butcher of Bosnia and Butcher of the Balkans in the media.

Legal Action and Outcome

In 1995, Mladić was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands, for genocide in the siege of Sarajevo and for the murder of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica. At the time, he lived in Serbia under the protection of Milošević; however, when the Serbian president was arrested in 2001, Mladić went into hiding, although he was seen in 2002 in a Serbian military area. The Serbian government of the post-Milošević era wished to capture the general in order to create closer ties with the European Union, and the authorities prepared a list of some fifty Serbs who aided his escape. Some were arrested, but Mladić continued to evade capture.

On May 26, 2011, Mladić was arrested at the house of his cousin Branislav Mladić. Authorities later determined that from 2002 to 2006, Mladić had been hidden by "a network of mostly Bosnian Serb former military officers," according to Marija Ristic and Filip Rudic for Balkan Insight, primarily in secure military barracks and in a number of Belgrade apartments. The effort was coordinated by former Bosnian Serb military commander Zdravko Tolimir, who had previously reported directly to Mladić. After Serbian police arrested ten people in 2006 for helping him evade justice, Mladić abandoned his former military network and began hiding with various relatives. He was aided during this time by Rade Bulatović, then head of the Security Intelligence Agency (Bezbednosno Informativna Agencija, or BIA). After the 2008 elections, when Boris Tadić was reelected president of Serbia and his Democratic Party (Demokratska stranka, or DS) retook control of Parliament after having been in opposition since 2003, Bulatović was removed from the BIA, and the search for Mladić began again in earnest.

Mladić's trial before the ICTY began proceedings at The Hague in June 2011, and main hearings began in May 2012. He had refused to enter a plea, so a not guilty plea was entered for him by the judge. Mladić also refused to testify in the trial of Karadžić on genocide charges. His own trial was adjourned in December 2016, after details of mass graves were presented and prosecutors recommended a life sentence. On November 22, 2017, Mladić was convicted on ten of eleven charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison. Although he appealed the conviction and sentence, in 2021 a UN court upheld them. Although he sought provisional release on humanitarian grounds because he was in ill health or transfer from the Netherlands to prison in Serbia, where he said he would receive better health care, the UN war crimes court denied him.

Impact

Ratko Mladić’s crimes, along with those of Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, contributed to the breakup of Yugoslavia and the establishment of Bosnia as an independent state, divided by the 1995 Dayton Accords into three religious autonomous communities.

Bibliography

Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990–1995. Office of Russian and European Analysis, Central Intelligence Agency, 2002–3. 2 vols.

Borger, Julian. The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt. Other Press, 2016.

Bowcott, Owen, and Julian Borger. "Ratko Mladić Convicted of War Crimes and Genocide at UN Tribunal." The Guardian, 22 Nov. 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/22/ratko-mladic-convicted-of-genocide-and-war-crimes-at-un-tribunal. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.

Glenny, Misha. The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War. 3rd rev. ed., Penguin Books, 1996.

Honig, Jan Willem, and Norbert Both. Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime. Penguin Books, 1997.

"Ratko Mladic Fast Facts." CNN, 21 May 2024, www.cnn.com/2013/04/29/world/europe/ratko-mladic-fast-facts/index.html. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

Ristic, Marija, and Filip Rudic. "Ratko Mladic's Fugitive Years Cloaked in Secrets and Lies." Balkan Insight, 16 Nov. 2017, www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/ratko-mladic-s-fugitive-years-cloaked-in-secrets-and-lies-11-15-2017. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.

Simons, Marlise, Aland Cowell, and Barbara Surk. "Mladic Conviction Closes Dark Chapter in Europe, but New Era of Uncertainty Looms." The New York Times, 22 Nov. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/world/europe/ratko-mladic-conviction-yugoslavia-bosnia.html. Accessed 11 Apr. 2018.

Stojadinović, Ljubodrag. Ratko Mladić: Tragic Hero. Translated and edited by Milo Yelesiyevich, Unwritten History, 2006.

Tahmiscija, Emina Dizdarevic. "Hague Court Rejects Ratko Mladic's Plea for Provisional Release." Balkan Insight, 21 May 2024, balkaninsight.com/2024/05/21/hague-court-rejects-ratko-mladics-plea-for-provisional-release/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.

T. J. "What's Next?" The Economist, 27 May 2011, www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2011/05/ratko‗mladic. Accessed 7 Dec. 2017.