Four hundred pages of Ratko Mladic’s war diary, drawn by artist Vladimir Miladinovic, will be exhibited in a gallery in Belgrade. The exhibition called “Diary” for visitors will be open today and will last until the end of July.
“Each drawing is specially framed and four hundred of them carefully placed in neat rows form one monumental whole that includes the walls of the entire gallery,” says Miladinovic, writes Klix.ba.
“One of the ideas of this setting was to show the whole series in one place, for visitors to be faced with such important traces of the past, but at the same time with the impossibility of dealing with it,” he added.
The exhibition is based on Mladic’s war diary, which was found in 2010 behind a false wall in Belgrade in the house where he was hiding. He was arrested the following year, and in November 2017, the Hague Tribunal sentenced him to life in prison for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorizing the population of Sarajevo during the siege of the city and taking UN peacekeepers and for hostages.
“Mladic kept his diary every day, which means that he wrote down important details of his activities by hand. This manuscript, apart from what is written in the notebook, is also significant because of the way he wrote things down. When he was angry, the handwriting is visibly more dramatic, the letters become larger, and the trace with a pencil on paper is deeper “, explains Miladinovic.
Ratko Mladic was sentenced to life imprisonment before the ICTY in The Hague in November 2017.
After six years of trial, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) pronounced verdict to Mladic.
Mladic’s trial started back in May 2012 and lasted for more than four years. He was indicted for eleven counts of the indictment, including genocide and crimes against humanity as well as the violation of the laws and customs of war.
Mladic was also charged with committing the Srebrenica genocide, as well as terrorizing of citizens of Sarajevo and keeping the capital city of BiH under the siege.
