'Butcher of Bosnia' Mladic to face justice

After 16 years on the run, a frail and haggard Ratko Mladic was hauled before a judge in the first step towards charges for international war crimes, including the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.

No longer the fearsome, bull-necked “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mladic was arrested by intelligence agents yesterday in a pre-dawn raid at a relative’s house in a village in northern Serbia.

The act was trumpeted by the government as a victory for a country worthy of European Union membership and Western embrace.

Mladic, 69, one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives, was the top commander of the Bosnian Serb army during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, which killed more than 100,000 people and drove another 1.8 million from their homes.

Thousands of Muslims and Croats were killed, tortured or driven out in a campaign to purge the region of non-Serbs.

He was accused by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes for the massacre of Muslims by Bosnian Serb forces in eastern Bosnia and the relentless four-year siege of Sarajevo.

Mladic walked haltingly into a closed-door extradition hearing in Belgrade last night, where he asserted through his lawyer that he would not answer to the authority of the UN tribunal.

The former military commander wore a navy blue jacket and a baseball hat and carried what appeared to be a towel in his left hand. He could be heard on state TV saying “good day” to someone in the court and a guard told him: “Let’s go, general.”

Mladic’s lawyer, Milos Saljic, said the judge cut short the questioning because his client’s “poor physical state” left him unable to communicate.

“He is aware that he is under arrest, he knows where he is, and he said he does not recognise The Hague tribunal,” Mr Saljic said, adding that Mladic needed medical care and “should not be moved in such a state”.

Belgrade B-92 radio said one of Mladic’s arms was paralysed – probably the result of a stroke.

Deputy war crimes prosecutor Bruno Vekaric said Mladic was taking a lot of medicine, but “responds very rationally to everything that is going on”.

Extradition proceedings could take a week or more before Mladic’s expected transfer to The Hague, where he faces life imprisonment.

Judge Fouad Riad of the UN tribunal said there was evidence against Mladic of “unimaginable savagery”.

“Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson,” he said during Mladic’s 1995 indictment in absentia.

International law experts hope the arrest will send a message to figures like Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that no leader charged with a war crime can expect to escape justice forever.

“Impunity has really been withdrawn from war criminals,” said Richard Goldstone, the prosecutor in the 1995 indictment. “It’s a very different world and the prospects of them standing trial one day have been heightened considerably.”

US president Barack Obama, meeting with other world leaders at the G8 summit in France, hailed the arrest yesterday.

“May the families of Mladic’s victims find some solace in today’s arrest, and may this deepen the ties among the people of the region,” he said.

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said it marked “an important step in our collective fight against impunity”.

In Bosnia, the arrest was welcomed by the head of a group of victims’ relatives.

“I’m sorry for all the victims who are dead and cannot see this day,” said Munira Subasic.

The Serbian government, which has changed mightily while Mladic was at large, banned all public gatherings and tightened security in the country to prevent ultra-nationalists from making good on pledges to pour into the streets in protest.

The Serbian Radical Party called Mladic a “hero” and described his seizure as “one of the hardest moments in Serbian history”. And extreme right-wing group 1389 said the arrest was “treason”.

Hundreds of pro-Mladic demonstrators in the northern city of Novi Sad tried to break into the offices of the governing Democratic Party but were prevented by riot police. At least two people were reported injured.

President Boris Tadic appeared jubilant at a news conference announcing Mladic’s capture.

“We have ended a difficult period of our history and removed the stain from the face of Serbia and the members of our nation wherever they live,” he said.

A Serbian official close to Mr Tadic said the president had personally overseen the arrest operation, and compared it to Mr Obama’s involvement in the hunt for al Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.

But the raid in the village of Lazarevo, 60 miles north east of Belgrade, was no special forces operation and Serbian intelligence agents did not have to fire a shot. Mladic had two pistols with him in the single-storey yellow brick house, but put up no resistance, officials said.

Among the horrors Mladic is accused of, foremost is the July 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, which was supposed to be a safe zone guarded by Dutch peacekeepers.

The Dayton accords brought peace to Bosnia in 1995, and the following year Mladic was dismissed from his post. He continued to live in Bosnia, until his trail grew too hot and he moved with his family to Belgrade in the late 1990s, living free in a posh suburban villa.

Even as Mladic allies such as Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic were brought to The Hague, the former military leader was idolised and sheltered by ultra-nationalists and ordinary Serbs despite an £8.6 million Serbian government bounty, plus £3m (€2m) more offered by the US State Department.