OPINION- Editorial

Others say: Justice delayed

Justice for "The Butcher of Bosnia" has arrived a quarter of a century late. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted Ratko Mladic, onetime commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the barbarous killings of tens of thousands between 1992 and 1995.

Mladic, in his mid-70s, was sentenced to life in prison, a decision handed down four long years after his trial in The Hague began. What's even more frustrating is that justice comes 25 years after he oversaw the systematic eradication of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs in what is now independent Bosnia. His sentence closes the door on the tribunal's work.

In the salt mining town of Srebrenica, Mladic oversaw the July 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian men and boys. Before the mass executions, he appeared in the town and handed out candy to Muslim children in a guise aimed at reassuring townsfolk. Hours later his soldiers appeared. Many of the dead were found with their arms bound behind them, shot in the back of the head. The siege he unleashed in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo lasted more than three years, killing thousands with steady shelling and sniper fire.

It was a time, Serbian human rights activist Natasa Kandic told The New York Times after Mladic's sentencing, that Serbia "stopped being part of the civilized world."

Mladic went into hiding in 1997 and was able to escape justice for years, to a large degree with the help of the Serbian military. He was found in 2011, in a Romanian village near the Serbian border. After the tribunal's verdict, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein framed the decision as "a momentous victory for justice."

But a trial that lasts four years is justice detoured for too long. It smacks of an ineffectiveness that the UN, which oversees international tribunals like the Yugoslav tribunal and the International Criminal Court, needs to fix.

The United Nations-backed tribunal formed to investigate the Khmer Rouge's 1970s butchery of 1.7 million Cambodians took 11 years and cost $300 million. The yield? Just three convictions. In 2015, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and war crimes linked to the deaths of 200,000 people in the Darfur region. That year he appeared in South Africa for an African Union summit. Despite the ICC's request, the South African government allowed al-Bashir to return to Khartoum.

It's good to know that Mladic will spend the rest of his days in a prison cell rather than strutting the streets of Belgrade or in some tucked-away Romanian hamlet. But the families of his victims, and the survivors of his cruelty, should have had justice meted out much sooner. That's a takeaway the UN and its international tribunals should start heeding.

Editorial on 11/30/2017

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