UN Prosecutors Demand Life Sentence for Ratko Mladic

Concluding their closing arguments to the Hague-based war crimes tribunal on Wednesday, prosecutors said that Mladic should be sentenced to life in prison for genocide and other atrocities committed during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The time has come for Ratko Mladic to be held accountable for each of his victims and all the communities he destroyed. Imposing any sentence less than the severest available – a life sentence – would be… an insult to victims and contrary to justice,” prosecutor Alan Tieger said.

“Nobody can even imagine the depth of suffering for which Mladic is responsible,” he added.

He described Mladic as “the master of life and death” during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, illustrating his claim with the Bosnian Serb military chief’s words to Bosniaks evacuated from the town of Zepa in the summer of 1995: “I am giving you your lives as gift.”

Earlier on Wednesday, another prosecutor, Peter McCloskey, said Mladic had played a key role in planning and committing genocide in Srebrenica as part of a joint criminal enterprise aimed at “killing all able-bodied Muslim men” and deporting women, children and the elderly.

The prosecutors tried to prove Mladic’s “genocidal intention” in Srebrenica by presenting his statement on the day of the fall of the enclave to Bosnian Serb forces on July 11, 1995, when he said “the moment has come for us to take revenge against the Turks [pejorative term for Bosniaks] in this area”.

According to the prosecutor, Mladic’s genocidal intent was also obvious in his message to Srebrenica Bosniaks the following day, when he said they could “either survive or disappear”.

“Over the course of six days following those ominous comments, Mladic’s troops captured and killed more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys,” McCloskey said.

McCloskey said that according to numerous pieces of evidence, Mladic and his subordinate officers played a key role in planning and committing those murders.

The prosecutor rejected the defence’s allegations that the crimes in Srebrenica were committed by unidentified “paramilitary formations” and “avengers”, in collaboration with Bosnian Serb security officers over whom Mladic had no control, arguing that such claims were “absurd”.

He said that the forced removal of Bosniaks from Srebrenica was a goal that had been proclaimed by Bosnian Serb political and military leaders since 1992.

McCloskey quoted a directive issued in March 1995, in which Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic ordered Mladic’s forces to “conduct well-thought-out operations” in Srebrenica in order to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity, with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants”.

Mladic stands accused of the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in 1995, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, which allegedly reached the scale of genocide in several other municipalities in 1992, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The 74-year-old former Bosnian Serb military chief has said that he is innocent of the charges.

The defence will give its closing statements between December 9 and 13.