Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, who was serving a life sentence for his role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, has died, at the age of 84, multiple reports have confirmed.
The former general had been in poor health in recent years and was repeatedly hospitalised, reported Reuters. The slaughter in Srebrenica marked the horrific culmination of a more than three-year war in Bosnia. Some of the bodies were later exhumed and moved to remote mountain locations in an attempt to conceal evidence of the killings. The tribunal found that Mladić, along with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, was part of a criminal conspiracy to carry out the plan.
Mladić was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, which was one of the UN-designated ‘safe area’ of Bosnia, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War 2. During the conflict, Mladić’s nationalist Serb forces subjected the besieged capital Sarajevo to daily bombardment using artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns, killing around 10,000 people, according to Reuters. In July 1995, bodies of those killed in Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days.
Nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia ”, Mladić had been held at a UN detention centre since his arrest in 2011. The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) said the objective behind the killings was the “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian territory for a Greater Serbia, according to Reuters. Mladić, who was dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” by his opponents, rejected the tribunal’s authority during a 2014 hearing, saying: “I do not recognise this court,”. When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017, Mladic shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!” (With Reuters inputs)
