Hague Prosecutors Urge Second Genocide Conviction for Ratko Mladic

Ratko Mladic. Photo: MICT

In the second day of appeals hearings in Ratko Mladic’s trials at the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, the prosecution argued that the former Bosnian Serb military commander deserved a second genocide conviction, and that his life sentence should be upheld.

The UN court sentenced Mladic to life imprisonment in November 2017, finding him guilty of genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in 1995, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorising the population of Sarajevo during the siege of the city and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.

But he was acquitted of committing genocide in 1992 in six other Bosnian municipalities.

Prosecutor Laurel Baig argued on Wednesday that the judges in the original trial were mistaken by deciding that Mladic did not have the intent to commit genocide in five of these municipalities – Foca, Kotor-Varos, Prijedor, Sanski Most and Vlasenica – as part of a joint criminal enterprise.

She said that the judges should have concluded that Mladic and the other participants in the joint criminal enterprise wanted to remove Bosniaks as a group.

“It’s about intent, not how many people are targeted,” she explained.

She said that local perpetrators in the municipalities were responsible for thousands of killings of Bosniaks, “some of whom were killed in their homes, massacred, imprisoned and starved”.

She argued that Mladic had often spread hatred against Bosniaks in his speeches and suggested that Muslims were “the worst scum” and could be eliminated.

“He wanted an ethnically pure Serbian state to be established, and constantly threatened Muslims that they would disappear or be exterminated,” she said.

Mladic’s defence lawyer responded that the prosecution was “repeating failed trial arguments” and that it “failed to demonstrate the findings of the trial chamber were incorrect”, so his acquittal of the 1992 genocide charge should be upheld.

The defence appealed on Tuesday for an acquittal on all counts in the indictment, a retrial or a reduced sentence for Mladic.

But the prosecution responded on Wednesday by insisting that Mladic’s appeal should be rejected and his life sentence confirmed.

Baig argued that Mladic’s absence from Srebrenica during the days when the massacres of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were committed did not diminish the crimes, which the UN court has classified as genocide.

“In July 1995, Mladic used Bosnian Serb forces under his command to forcibly relocate thousands of Bosnian women, children and the elderly and to shoot thousands of Muslims,” Baig said.

She insisted that Mladic commanded and directed the coordinated operations of the Bosnian Serb Army and police forces.

“Srebrenica was Mladic’s operation, and the trial chamber was quite right when it concluded that he was criminally responsible,” she said.

The defence had argued that the Bosnian Serb Army’s offensive to seize the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995 was a legitimate military operation. It claimed that a number of Bosniaks got killed in legitimate attacks, and that Mladic did not know of any plan to kill able-bodied men.

The final verdict in the trial is expected nine months after the appeals.