JTA — In keeping with Jewish tradition and the directive of Proverbs 24:17, I do not rejoice at the death of Ratko Mladić. I do, however, take profound satisfaction in the fact that the survivors of his crimes and the families of his victims have seen him spend the past 15 years in a prison cell.
Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general who died Thursday in a prison hospital at The Hague, was convicted of the crime of genocide in November 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Reviled as the “Butcher of Bosnia” by Bosnian Muslims and obscenely hailed as a hero by Bosnian Serbs and Serbs generally, he was serving a life sentence at the time of his death.
Over the years, in my prior capacity as general counsel and associate executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, I stood numerous times at the Srebrenica cemetery in eastern Bosnia together with survivors of the genocide he perpetrated there. As a law professor at Cornell and Columbia, and in direct appeals to the Jewish community at large, I have long held up Mladić as epitomizing the legal definition of genocide. Reminding ourselves collectively why this is the case is especially important at a time when people who should know better, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, indiscriminately and irresponsibly hurl the charge of genocide against the State of Israel.
