Memories of the cruel Balkan Wars of 1992-1995 are already slipping away. But the sentence to life in prison for Serb general Ratko Mladic by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague for crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing last week shows that justice occasionally prevails.
These crimes in the Balkans were of epic proportion, sadistic, and profoundly sickening, even to a hardened war correspondent like me.
Serbia’s banker-turned demagogue, Slobodan Milosevic, and Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, formulated a strategy to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia, purged of Catholics and Muslims, that would recreate the glory of the medieval Serb kingdom. They rose to power on calls to ‘send the Turks (i.e. Muslims) back to Turkey.’ Ironically, Bosnia’s Muslims were mainly descendants of medieval Christian Bogomil heretics who had been savagely persecuted by Orthodox Christians and converted to Islam for protection.
Mladic led the Bosnian Serb army (along with units from Serbia’s Army) in a multi-year campaign to uproot, expel or kill the Catholic Croat and Muslim population of the ex-Yugoslav republic of Bosnia. The Serb Army then turned its murderous rage to the former Yugoslav region of Kosovo that was 95-98% ethnic Albanian. The world learned the term, ‘ethnic cleansing.’
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Gen. Mladic was convicted of engineering the massacre of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, and the bloody siege of Bosnia’s capitol, Sarajevo. Srebrenica was the worst war crime in Europe since World War II. To these atrocities add ethnic massacres across Bosnia…