Ratko Mladic will die in prison. But go to Bosnia and you'll see that he actually won.

General Ratko Mladic, the bloodiest soldier since the Third Reich, will die in prison. Any other verdict from the one received at The Hague would be highly absurd.

Mothers of more than 8 thousand men and boys killed in Srebrenica within five days in the summer of 1995 have every reason to welcome the sentence of life in prison and the genocide given to him - the only legal standard with which that crime could be measured.

I have testified against Mladic, as I have testified against Radovan Karadzic and seven others in The Hague: mostly to provide evidence of the network of concentration camps that I had discovered for this newspaper in 1992, of mass murder, of ethnic cleansing, of violations and disasters that occurred in those bloody years.

Today I spend my time calling survivors. Apart from those who suffered in Srebrenica's skin, no one else shared the joy of punishing Mladic.

He faced two counts of genocide -- the first for Srebrenica, and the other for what happened in other municipalities in Bosnia. Here, a series of various atrocities were done by Mladic's troops with his direct command in those years, while the international community only stood and watched if it didn't do something worse. The whole idea of The Hague Tribunal was as an act of repentance for that failure that was like ambition to establish a genuine international justice. Mladic's positions include mass murder, torture, disability and rape, in Omarska, Trnopollje and Keretem camps in northeast Bosnia. In the east, in Visegrad, civilians included babies had been taken home alive to burn, or were placed under a bridge to hunt, or were torn, or thrown into the Drina River. Then there were numerous deminings of villages and neighbourhoods, and all non-Serbs, with death and deportation; destruction of Catholic mosques and churches; gathering women and girls to camps for rape all night long, every night. And others.

None of this has been described as genocide. Mladic has been acquitted of these charges. The question, then, of what was he condemned?

Among those who heard the verdict at The Hague was Kelima Dabutovic, who survived the Trnopolje camp, while her husband was in Omarska, and lost many of her family and neighbors. The “is so disappointing, yet I am not surprised,” she said. Maybe they didn't want to call it genocide because it happened in the eyes of the international community that was there to protect us. However, I hope historians do better than judges. ”

Among the worst and irritability of the Tribunal was the 2015 imprisonment of one of the most experienced officials, Florence Hartmann, for journalistic coverage of Srebrenica, which received an unpublished material from the trial. Hartmann, since her cell could see Mladic doing his daily exercises, says today that no “genocide in history occurs in five summer days. Genocide is a process. ”

She adds that unlike other verdicts, Serbia's role has been completely forgotten: “Verdicti has stripped genocide of ideology, from the historical and international context. ”

That's a good note. Human Rights Watch has celebrated the fact that the verdict “had sent a message to those in power side-by-side the world committing brutal atrocities, in Burma, North Korea or Syria”, while preparations have begun for war crimes prosecutions in Syria.

But who will be brought to justice? Mladic was a soldier, and better in prison than free. But, while Archbishop Desmond Tutu was well asked: where was Tony Blair when justice had to be served in the country for the destructions in Iraq? Will justice be stripped even of Putin's Assad, and of anyone who has supported the Islamic State [of Islam]. And everyone who bombed Yemen?

The Hague Tribunal was also done with the reason to promote the reconciliation of peoples in Balkans. Mladic received what he wanted -- a Serbian mini-state in Bosnia, from which each non-Serb has been expelled since 1995. He is loved, his portrait is placed on bars and office walls in Bosnia and Serbia, and his name is called at football matches.

Even the chief of prosecutors in The Hague, Serge Brammertz, acknowledged that “conflict and atrocities can get a logic of them”; life in Bosnia is more sectarian and fanatic today than ever since the war, with all sides lined up in their community areas in a common hatred, which is incidentally, bidders of major benefits for the relevant political class that leads them. Mladic is certainly an angry man, but he can start his sentence with a joy that his mission has been accomplished.

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