7 hours agoLife sentence for Bosnian “Casap”: Will Serbian nationalism shrink?
Periskopi(5 years ago)
(5 years ago)The Hague has supported Ratko Mladic's life sentence. But this is unlikely to make Serbia accept responsibility for its role in Yugoslav wars, says human rights activist Sonja Biserko, writes Deutsche Welle Serbian General Ratko Mladic is notorious for not only his crimes in Croatia and [...]
Serbian General Ratko Mladic is notorious for his crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s Yugoslav wars, 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 Serbian governments.
On Tuesday, The Hague International Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMTC) upheld life sentence and imprisonment against Mladic. Courts of the House of Appeals found him guilty of 10 out of 11 counts, including genocide, crimes against humanity, violations of the laws or customs of war, and once again sentenced him to prison.
The Importance of War Crimes Court
The work of The Hague war crimes tribunal has been extremely important for the Western Balkans because it has revealed widespread evidence of crimes committed in Yugoslav wars. However, there is still no evidence of Mladic's ties with Belgrade and Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president at the time of the wars, as well as other key figures mentioned in the 1991 indictment against him. The 1997 sentence of Dusko Tadic, the first person to be tried by The Hague Tribunal, stresses that the Bosnian war was an armed international conflict.
In the case against Ratko Mladic, the court did not link him to Serbia. Nor did it include the well-documented genocide in six Bosniak municipalities at the beginning of the war in 1992, which prosecutors consider responsible.
In Serbia, to date, 26 years after the end of the war, The Hague tribunal's decisions concerning Serbia are considered anti-Serb. Public legalisation tends to focus almost entirely on indictments of war criminals from other countries. The fact that the Serbian state itself is not accused of criminal activity allows people to deny any Serb responsibility for war and war crimes.
Wrong Serb Confession
Instead, the conflict is described as a “liberation war for Serbs” in Bosnia, and Islamic fundamentalism is blamed for Yugoslavia's collapse. A national confession has developed that portrays Serbs as stigmatized victims of the world, not least because of their proximity to Russia.
The 1995 Srebrenica genocide was actually part of a Serbian strategy that defined Bosnia's eastern town and Gorazden's Zepa, two more “safe” zones declared by the UN as a kind of Muslim corridor, which allegedly linked Sarajevo with Turkey through the Sandzak Serb region, which had a majority Muslim population.
According to Serbia's interpretation, this green “hort” posed a threat to all of Europe, so Srebrenica was a target for Mladic since the beginning of the war in 1992. This interpretation remains good in Serbia today.
