Communist profile turned into Balkan Casap

Year after year, evidence of Bosnian war horrors has followed each other. For two decades, officials and reporters recorded the pain of those who survived, losing a lot.

It's evidence of women and men, people who came out alive from bloody conflict three years old, but that the start of their lives was practically cut off. In their eyes, the man who led the Serb-Bosnian forces in the campaign of death, General Ratko Mladic is the projection of evil, deliberate and prepared wickedness to pave the way for genocide, a symbol of the system that wiped out and again tried to hide traces of his crimes, which continues to cover the soil of mass graves throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.
But mothers who collected the bones of their children, talking to those skeletons as if they were alive, have only one truth to confess. Mladic is probably the world's most famous mass killer still in life, according to “Der Spiegel”.

Ratko Mladic was born March 1942 in the village of Bozinovic, about 50km south of Sarajevo, in an idyllic region inhabited by poor farmers, said to have once been deployed as a soldier.

The father, Tito's Partisan, was killed by fascist militiamen when he was 2 years old. Former army colleagues remember how in his youth, Mladic was a type of “supermen<x1) Bosniak, a man of everything: swimming, diving, running; first in shooting; and a communist determined to climb the career ladder very quickly.

Following Slovenia and Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia in 1991, he was ordered to lead the Serb rebellion in the Croatian region of Krajina. When Slobodan Milosevic needed someone to implement his war policies in Bosnia, he chose Mladic, then 49, and the obedient military paid off with the post of Bosnian Serb Army Chief of Staff.

He hasn't come back since then. During the more than three-year siege of Sarajevo, where about 14,000 people died, he personally instructed snipers to shoot civilians. It was one of the organisers of the “Mazackra of Srebrenica”, where 8,000 Muslim boys and men were murdered in cold blood, an area that should be under UN protection.

The word "man" cannot be used for Mladic”, formerly said the retired general of the Bosnian Army, Jovan Divjak, while the former American ambassador to Yugoslavia described him as Heinrich Himmler of his generation.

But for many Serbs, this man continues to remain a hero and be regarded as one of the few leaders who did not use the war to make personal gain. For the rest, however, the rabid nationalist who viewed himself as the avenger of Serbs for the centuries-old rule of Turks in the Balkans, even the rot in prison, has little.