UN Prosecutors: Ratko Mladic’s Defence ‘Distorts Reality’

“The evidence points to Mladic’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt,” prosecutor Alan Tieger told the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Thursday as the prosecution mounted its rebuttal of the defence’s closing arguments.

Tieger said that the defence’s arguments were based on inaccurate and delusionary interpretations of the facts and disregard for the evidence.

“Mladic was not a superman, as the defence says we suggest, but just a man who had enough strength to go through Bosnia as if through cheese, and used those powers to commit crimes and destroy the community,” he told the UN war crimes tribunal.

Mladic is 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 six other municipalities in 1992, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

The prosecution has demanded a life sentence, while the defence has called for acquittal.

Tieger rejected the defence allegation that Mladic was on trial “only because he is a Serb.

He insisted that Mladic’s defence also tried to lay the blame on former Bosnian Serb president and supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Radovan Karadzic.

In fact, Karadzic and Mladic were “the key partners in all four joint criminal enterprises [listed in the indictment]”, he argued.

“Jointly they worked on a strategic goal to separate Serbs from Muslims and Croats and agreed it was a historical chance to create a Serb state with as few internal enemies as possible and the instruments for achieving that,” he said.

He reminded the tribunal of testimony by defence witness Luka Dragicevic, a Bosnian Serb Army officer, who said Serbs were “stronger, better, prettier and smarter than Muslims”.

In order to prove that the Bosnian Serb Army, which was under Mladic’s command, ethnically cleansed municipalities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, the prosecutor quoted Mladic, who once said “there are no Muslims in Bratunac” and that “it was a completely Serb town”.

As a proof of Mladic’s “genocidal intention” to destroy Muslims in Srebrenica, the prosecutor quoted his statement that “the time has come for us to take revenge on Turks [a pejorative term for Bosniaks] in this region”.

He also rejected the defence lawyers’ attempt to lay the blame for the persecution in the six Bosnian municipalities and in detention camps in 1992 on the Bosnian Serb police.

He repeated that the Bosnian Serb and police “jointly held the detention camps and implemented ethnic cleansing”.

Tieger said the defence’s allegation that the Bosnian Army shot at its own people in Sarajevo in order to blame the Serbs as “an insinuation which distorted reality”.

He rejected defence claims that this was confirmed by UN peacekeeping force UNPROFOR’s commander Michael Rose.

“Rose said he knew of such allegations in the media, but not that those allegations were based in truth,” Tieger said.

Tieger also denied the defence’s allegation that Bosnian Serb forces only “legitimately responded to fire” that came from the city.

“On the contrary, the entire city was targeted by the vicious shelling and sniping,” he said.

Responding to the defence’s thesis that there was no written order issued by Mladic to kill all the Bosniak captives from Srebrenica in July 1995, the prosecutor argued out that, according to the evidence, Mladic gave the order “orally”.

He rejected the defence’s allegations that women, children and the elderly were not deported from Srebrenica, but were “relocated in good faith”.

He quoted a Dutch UNPROFOR officer, who said the population of Srebrenica were offered a choice between “slow death” and leaving.

Later on Thursday, Mladic’s defence will respond to the prosecutors’ closing arguments.

The verdict in the trial is expected in November 2017.