Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a UN-designated “safe area” of Bosnia, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two, has died, a UN official said on Thursday.
The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000.
The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.
The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was “ethnic cleansing” – the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.
The tribunal found that Mladic, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
