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Ratko Mladic, the so-called “butcher of Bosnia” who has reportedly died at the age of either 83 or 84, had insisted he was chosen by “fate” to defend the Serb people from a Western onslaught.
But he spent his last years in jail for genocide after he was convicted in 2017 for war crimes in Bosnia that the tribunal said at the time were “amongst the most heinous known to humankind”.
The most notorious was the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995 — a genocide, the court decided, orchestrated by military leader Mladic and his political comrade Radovan Karadzic.
The slaughter — the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II — led media across the world to dub him “the butcher of Bosnia”.
