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Bosnian-Serb former General Ratko Mladic is infamous — not only for
his crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav
Wars of the 1990s, for which he was given a life sentence in 2017,
but also because he was able to hide and escape justice for 16 years
thanks to the support of various democratic governments of Serbia.
On Tuesday, the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal
Tribunals (IRMTC) in The Hague upheld the conviction and the
sentence against Mladic. The judges of the successor to the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
found him guilty of 10 out of 11 counts, including of genocide,
crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war
and sentenced him once again to life imprisonment.
Importance of war crimes tribunal
The work of the war crimes tribunal in The Hague has been extremely
important for the Western Balkans because it has brought to light
extensive evidence of the crimes committed in the Yugoslav Wars.
However, there is still no proof of Mladic's connections to Belgrade
and Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian president at the time of the wars,
as well as other leading figures mentioned in the 1991 indictment
against the latter. The 1997 sentence of Dusko Tadic, the first
person to be tried by the ICTY, stated that the Bosnian War was an
armed international conflict.
In the case against Ratko Mladic, the tribunal did not link him to
Serbia. Nor did it include the well-documented genocide in six
Bosnian communities at the beginning of the war in 1992, for which
prosecutors hold him responsible.
In Serbia, to this day — 26 years after the end of the war — the
verdicts of the Hague tribunal regarding Serbia are considered to be
anti-Serbian. Public discourse tends to focus almost entirely on
indictments of war criminals from other countries. The fact that the
Serbian state itself has not been accused of criminal activity
enables people to deny any Serbian responsibility for the wars and
war crimes.
Misguided Serbian narrative
Instead, the conflict is described as a "war of liberation for the
Serbs" in Bosnia and Islamic fundamentalism is blamed for the
collapse of Yugoslavia. A national narrative has developed that
portrays Serbs as victims who are stigmatized by the world, not
least because of their proximity to Russia.
The 1995 Srebrenica genocide was in fact part of a Serbian strategy
that defined the eastern Bosnian town and Zepa and Gorazde, two
other UN-declared "safe areas," as a kind of Muslim corridor, which
supposedly linked Sarajevo with Turkey via the Serb region of
Sandzak, which had a majority Muslim population, and Kosovo and
Albania, whose inhabitants are majority Muslim.
According to Serbia's interpretation, this "green transverse" posed
a danger to the whole of Europe, which is why Srebrenica was a goal
for Mladic from the beginning of the war in 1992. This
interpretation remains pertinent in Serbia today.
Srebrenica massacre discredited international community
The Bosnian War challenged the West's credibility and its proclaimed
values, and the Srebrenica massacre discredited the entire
international community. From a moral standpoint, it marked a
turning point in the war and was also a symbol of the indifference
and ignorance of Western countries towards the murder taking part in
the Balkans.
This is why Srebrenica led to serious debates all over the world. In
2015, Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that
condemned the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide and was an attempt
to recognize the roughly 8,000 victims and establish an
international day of commemoration.
While Bosnia continues its stubborn fight for a functioning and
pluralistic state, in Belgrade criminals indicted in The Hague have
been rehabilitated. Many of them are treated as national heroes who
sacrificed themselves for the "Serbian cause."
Serbian elites have to answer questions
The upholding of the verdict against Mladic, the cruelest of
Bosnian-Serb war criminals, will have no effect in Serbia. The
national narrative on the disintegration of Yugoslavia has led to a
concept of responsibility that makes it difficult for the Serbian
state to admit any guilt. This would only be made possible by a
radical transformation of Serbian society, which in turn will only
be possible when the country's elites answer the following
questions:
Are they ready to admit that institutions such as the Yugoslav army
and Serbia's security services helped to enforce Milosevic's Greater
Serbia policy?
Will they accept that there were deportations and massacres against
known and named civilians because of their cultural or religious
affiliation?
Will they acknowledge that there is evidence that the bodies of
victims were transferred to so-called secondary and tertiary mass
graves and that they were mutilated and sometimes burnt?
Will they acknowledge that cultural and religious heritage was
deliberately destroyed in order to destroy the identity of
non-Serbian ethnic and religious communities?
Will they accept that the lack of will on Serbia's political and
cultural elites to examine the country's past responsibly poses a
significant obstacle to its prospects of joining the EU?
Will they concede that the ongoing relativization of Serbian
responsibility for the Yugoslav Wars prevents relations between the
countries and peoples of the Western Balkans from normalizing?
Will they accept that this relativization means that Serbian society
and its value system are becoming increasingly regressive?
Will they accept that the principle of criminal liability is one of
the key elements for establishing rule of law in Serbia?
Serbia cannot become a modern European society if it refuses to
reckon with the past and with Ratko Mladic's crimes. |
