Mladic conviction closes dark chapter in Europe

Ediba Salihovic stands up and raises her hands Wednesday as she reacts along with other Bosnian women upon hearing the sentence at the end of former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic’s trial at the memorial center in Potocari, near Srebrenica, Bosnia. A U.N. court convicted Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison.
Ediba Salihovic stands up and raises her hands Wednesday as she reacts along with other Bosnian women upon hearing the sentence at the end of former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic’s trial at the memorial center in Potocari, near Srebrenica, Bosnia. A U.N. court convicted Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to life in prison.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- It was perhaps the closing of Europe's most shameful chapter of atrocity and bloodletting since World War II.

With applause inside and outside the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Gen. Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday for genocide and a catalog of other crimes.

It was the last major item of business for the tribunal in The Hague before it wound down the case involving Bosnia Serb ethnic cleansing, a full quarter-century after many of the crimes on its docket were committed.

From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found, Mladic, 75, was the chief military organizer of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs off their lands to leave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.

The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mladic's forces overran the U.N.-protected enclave of Srebrenica.

Sitting impassively at first in the court in a blue suit and tie, Mladic seemed much smaller than the burly commander in fatigues who had appeared before the media occasionally during the war to defend himself and his forces.

At one point, Mladic disappeared from the court, apparently to receive treatment for a dangerous surge in his blood-pressure levels. Upon returning, he began shouting at the court in a dispute over his blood pressure.

"You are lying, you are lying, you are lying," he yelled at the bench. The judges then ordered him to be removed.

In pronouncing the life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said that Mladic's crimes "rank among the most heinous known to humankind." Mladic's lawyers said they would appeal.

But if Mladic's punishment drew a line of sorts -- juridically at least -- it was a halting and ambivalent marker between Europe's epochs of uncertainty.

Far from the quieted theaters of Balkan conflict, nationalist passions, the clamor for redrawn frontiers and collisions of faith are rising anew, not to the crump of mortar fire and the stutter of machine guns, but in the recharting of the political landscape.

In October, Austria became the latest European nation to veer to the right, following Hungary and Poland. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany secured enough votes in national elections in September to enter Parliament for the first time. In many lands there is a sense of flux, from the secessionist yearnings of Catalonia in Spain to Britain's planned departure from the European Union.

Some of those passions are drawn from the angry response among Germans and other Europeans to Chancellor Angela Merkel's readiness to open Germany's frontiers to hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and elsewhere -- many of whom passed through Serbia on their way north.

In Britain, many who voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union did so, they said, out of resentment of outsiders' influence over their destinies and the presence of what they saw as unchecked European immigrants.

In Serbia, calls are intensifying for a return to the nationalist politics of the 1990s. Once-discredited senior officials from the barbarous government of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade -- and not a few convicted war criminals -- are reclaiming positions of prominence.

There is a sense, too, of unfinished business and resentments that the war did not heal. Indeed, the trials of Mladic and others, including his political boss Radovan Karadzic, who was jailed for 40 years on almost identical charges last year, may simply have intensified Serbia's rancorous perceptions of being treated unfairly and Muslims' sense of loss.

"Regardless of the verdict that we all feel as part of the campaign against Serbs, Ratko Mladic remains a legend of the Serb nation," said Milorad Dodik, president of the Serb autonomous region in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was carved out and cleansed of non-Serbs by Mladic's wartime forces.

Sead Numanovic, a Bosnian journalist in Sarajevo who fought against Mladic's forces, said, "This verdict, like all the others, will not bring back sons to their mothers, dead brothers to their sisters and husbands to their wives."

The sense of victimhood among Serbs seemed to have been trumped on Wednesday by the sentencing of Mladic, which all but confirmed Bosnian Muslim resentments that the Serbs had succeeded in advancing their territorial ambitions by genocide.

"This should all have been behind us by now," said Hasan Nuhanovic, a Bosnian survivor of the Srebrenica massacre. "The only thing that is behind us is that war."

On both sides of the enduring ethnic divide, there was a feeling that the pronouncements of robed judges at The Hague will have no perceptible impact on the practicalities of eking out an existence in straitened times.

Bosnians in Sarajevo who once ran from snipers' bullets and sheltered from incessant indiscriminate shelling by Mladic's artillery units in the hills above the city have traded those perils for a dysfunctional government, joblessness and a collapsed social security and health system. (In The Hague on Wednesday, Orie said Mladic had personally directed some of that deadly fire.)

In Belgrade, the crumbling socialist-era grandeur harks back to better times, when the city was the capital of a moderately developed Yugoslavia with a population of 22 million, rather than the impoverished republic it is today, among Europe's poorest.

Coupled with that struggle is a lingering memory not just of the war in Bosnia and Croatia of the early 1990s but also of the fighting later in the decade in what was then the southern Serbian province of Kosovo. To this day, banners in front of the Parliament building hold Bill and Hillary Clinton responsible for the widely resented 78-day NATO campaign that drove Serb-dominated forces out of Kosovo, enabling it to eventually declare independence in 2008.

Against that dim backdrop, Serbia is hoping to become the next member state of the European Union, although that would be in 2025 at the earliest.

Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, "we stopped being part of the civilized world."

"Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion," Kandic said.

NW News on 11/23/2017

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