Ratko Mladic, a convicted war criminal, was arrested on May 26th, 2011, 16 years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Although he is officially characterized as a fugitive, many believe that he lived freely under the protection of individuals from Serbian institutions.
Half a year before the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Hague Tribunal indicted Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, Generals of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). Karadzic has already been sentenced to life imprisonment. Biljana Plavsic, the president of RS, dismissed Mladic from his military position in 1996.
Mladic then withdrew from the public, and it is assumed that after the war he lived in Serbia, where he was arrested on May 26th, 2011 in the village of Lazarevo. Claims by the Serbian authorities that they could not find him became increasingly dubious, which supported the belief that he was protected by individuals from the institutions of the Serbian state.
Questions about his protection intensified after the murder of two guardsmen, Dragan Jakovljevic and Drazen Milovanovic, in the barracks in Belgrade’s Topcider neighborhood in 2004. Many believe that the guardsmen were killed because they saw Mladic, which further strengthened the belief that he was under protection.
These murders have considerably dissuaded those who expected that the fall of Slobodan Milosevic‘s regime, that is, the election of the government, which presented itself as democratic, would lead to the imminent arrest of the criminal Mladic. The arrest was awaited for years despite the fact that it was one of the key conditions for Serbia’s membership in the European Union (EU).
It seems that the monetary rewards offered for useful information that would lead to an arrest did not contribute to this either. A few months before the arrest, in October 2010, the Government of Serbia offered 10 million euros for such information.
Snapshots of free life
The videos, which were broadcast in 2009 in the political magazine “60 Minutes” on Federal Television (FTV), led many to be even more convinced that the criminal Mladic is really under the protection of the authorities in Serbia. The videos show Mladic casually hanging out, dancing, singing and taking photos among a large number of people. So the fugitive lived as a free man.
A year after the release of these recordings, his family asked to be declared dead, claiming that he was in poor health and that they had no contact with him. It was only in 2011 that what many war victims had been waiting for for years happened.
“On behalf of the Republic of Serbia, I inform you that Ratko Mladic was arrested today in the morning. He was arrested in a coordinated operation carried out by the Security and Information Agency (BIA) and the Service for the Detection of War Crimes,” said the then Serbian president and head of the ruling Democratic Party (DS) Boris Tadic.
He concluded that the arrest represents “the closing of a difficult page of common history.”
How he was arrested
Vladimir Vukcevic, the leader of the Action Team for Locating and Arresting Hague Fugitives in Serbia, recalled in an interview with the BBC three years ago how the arrest happened.
A family gathering in the village of Lazarevo near Zrenjanin was used for this purpose.
“Their family holiday is St George’s Day (Djurdjevdan) and his son’s family was visiting, so we noticed that they were taking a lot of photos. We thought there was a courier in the house, who would take photos of the family to Bosnia, because we had information that Mladic was there. We waited courier, but he didn’t come out, so we decided to take an action. When the policemen entered the house, Mladic tried to hide behind the door. When they found him, they didn’t recognize him immediately, even though he didn’t have a Hollywood disguise like Karadzic. There were documents on the table in the name of Ratko Mladic, so he admitted that they were his,” Vukcevicpointed out.
After the arrest, the Serbian Radical Party organized protests where several thousand people gathered, and the rally ended with a clash between a small group of demonstrators and the police.
After numerous alleged attempts to arrest him and after many false announcements that he had been arrested, the surviving victims of the war gained hope that the criminal Mladic would be punished.
He was allowed to visit his daughter’s grave
Unlike many who could not say goodbye to those killed by Mladic, after his arrest he was allowed to visit the grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994. Vukcevicpointed out that it was asked for him to be allowed to do so for only 15 minutes, but he stayed as long as he wanted because they knew he was facing life imprisonment.
In November 2017, Mladic was extrajudicially sentenced to life imprisonment before the Hague Court. He was convicted of persecution, murders, deportations, forced transfers, terrorism, illegal attacks on civilians, and hostage-taking.
At that time, he was convicted only for the genocide in Srebrenica, but not for the mass murders in other cities and municipalities of BiH, which some consider to be genocide as well.
On June 8th, 2021, the International Mechanism for Criminal Courts (IMCM) issued a second-instance verdict confirming the life sentence of the criminal Ratko Mladic for the genocide in Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, terrorizing the citizens of Sarajevo and taking members of UNPROFOR as hostages, Klix.ba reports.
