The Butcher of Bosnia is finally convicted

Defiant up until the end of his five-year trial, Ratko Mladic desperately tried to postpone the verdict but it’s unlikely to further post-war reconciliation in Bosnia, writes Daria Sito-Sucic    

In the 1990s he was the burly, brash general leading nationalist Bosnian Serbs towards a seemingly sweeping victory in Bosnia’s war. Two decades later, he was reduced to an ailing old man trying in vain to delay judgment for genocide in a UN court.

Yesterday, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted Ratko Mladic, 74, in one of the highest profile war crimes cases since the post-World War Two Nuremberg trials of Germany’s Nazi leadership.