Bosnian Serbs await verdict on Mladic appeal

Residents of Bozanici, a remote rural community in east Bosnia, are bracing for the final verdict by a UN war crimes tribunal in nearly a decade-long trial of Ratko Mladic - a man they consider their village's greatest son, but who is known around the world as the "Butcher of Bosnia."

They say they will be watching closely on June 8, when the judges of the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, issue their verdict on an appeal by the former general, who commanded Bosnian Serb troops during the Balkan country's brutal 1992-95 ethnic war, against his genocide conviction.

The prosecution have also appealed, seeking to overturn Mladic's acquittal on wider genocide charges. The tribunal convicted Mladic in 2017 on one count of genocide and nine other war crimes charges and ordered him jailed for life. He appealed against the genocide conviction over the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, east Bosnia, where troops under his command summarily executed some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, scattering their remains over the nearly 100 mass graves around the town.

"He did nothing wrong," insists his uncle, 87-year-old Mile Mladic, claiming his nephew had been arrested and convicted at the behest of the United States without "any evidence" of his wrongdoing.

Similar sentiment is shared by many Serbs beyond the name sign reading "Ratko Mladic Street" at the bottom of a steep, potholed road leading into the hilltop village of about a dozen ramshackle houses. They believe Mladic only defended the Orthodox Serbs in the war which erupted after Bosnia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia, despite the opposition by Serbs who accounted for about one-third of its ethnically and religiously mixed population.

Most of some 100,000 people who died during the conflict were Muslim Bosniaks, slain in notorious Serb ethnic cleansing campaigns throughout the country. But at the entrance to Kalinovik, the city nearest to Bozanici, visitors are greeted by an oversized mural of saluting Ratko Mladic with the word "hero" written above his head.

Pero Kovacevic, a native of Kalinovik and a former Bosnian Serb fighter, rejects that what happened in Srebrenica constituted a genocide. "The international community insists that it was a genocide because they want to pin the blame for a genocide on the Serbs," he said.

Further east, in the city of Foca, a wall at the side of one of the main urban streets is decorated by an oversized portrait of Mladic in uniform, next to words expressing gratitude to his mother for giving birth to him. "For me he is an icon. And for the Serb people, he is an icon," said Milije Radovic, a member of an association of Bosnian Serb war veterans with offices in downtown Foca. "We created Republika Srpska together and nobody can deny it to us," said Srdjan Stankovic, the chairman of the association.

"Our fighters did, under the command of that man," he added, turning to point at a large photo of Mladic in his military uniform displayed in the front window of the association. Stankovic was referring to the Serb-run part of Bosnia, established in 1995 under the terms of the US-brokered peace agreement which ended more than 3 1/2 years of bloodshed in the country.

The agreement brought an end to the fighting, but it formalized the ethnic divisions by splitting Bosnia into two semi-autonomous parts, the other one being a federation shared by Bosniaks and Croats, linked by weak joint institutions. While the country has been at peace for over a quarter-century, Bosnian Serb political leaders continue to call for secession of their lands and vocally deny the war-time atrocities their ethnic kin had committed to reach that goal.

While charged with war crimes already in 1995 by the UN war crimes court, Mladic evaded justice until 2011 when he was caught and handed over to The Hague in neighboring Serbia by the then-ruling pro-democratic government. Serbia is currently run by former ultranationalists who have vigorously protested Mladic's arrest, deny numerous international court rulings that genocide was committed in Srebrenica and are favorably speaking of the convicted Serb war criminals.

However, Sofia Stolk, a researcher at the T.M.C. Asser Institute in The Hague, said the upcoming appeal verdict is important because it closes the tribunal's last key case and because it concerns the charge of genocide, the deliberate killing of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group. Stolk acknowledged the reaction in the Balkans to this and other war crimes trials is mixed but said the verdict on June 9 will be "the final answer" about what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s, at least from the legal point of view.