More than 20 years later
The former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, nicknamed the ‘butcher of Bosnia’, has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Mladić was found guilty at the United Nations-backed international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague of 10 offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.
As he entered the courtroom, Mladić gave a broad smile and thumbs up to the cameras – a gesture that infuriated relatives of the victims. His defiance shifted into detachment as the judgment began: Mladić played with his fingers and nodded occasionally, looking initially relaxed.
The verdict was disrupted for more than half an hour when he asked the judges for a bathroom break. After he returned, defence lawyers requested that proceedings be halted or shortened because of his high blood pressure. The judges denied the request. Mladić then stood up shouting “this is all lies” and “I’ll fuck your mother”. He was forcibly removed from the courtroom. The verdicts were read in his absence.
Interesting how they go for the mother, isn’t it. Duterte called Obama “son of a whore.” It’s always a woman’s fault really.
Men and boys were the victims at Srebrenica though.
The one-time fugitive from international justice faced 11 charges, two of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. He was cleared of one count of genocide, but found guilty of all other charges. The separate counts related to “ethnic cleansing” operations in Bosnia, sniping and shelling attacks on besieged civilians in Sarajevo, the massacre of Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and taking UN personnel hostage in an attempt to deter Nato airstrikes.
The trial took 530 days spread out over four years, with more than 600 people testifying.
Relatives of victims flew into the Netherlands to attend the hearing, determined to see Mladić receive justice decades after the end of the war in which more than 100,000 people were killed.
Among those present was Fikret Alić, the Bosnian who was photographed as an emaciated prisonerbehind the wire of a prison camp in 1992. “Justice has won and the war criminal has been convicted,” he said after the verdict. Others were reduced to tears by the judge’s description of past atrocities.
Phil Nijhuis/AP
There are still people who think he’s a hero though.
The hearing, broadcast live, was followed closely in Bosnia. The Bosnian prime minister, Denis Zvizdić, said the verdict “confirmed that war criminals cannot escape justice regardless of how long they hide”.
In Lazarevo, the Serbian village where Mladić was arrested in 2011, residents dismissed the guilty verdicts as biased. One, Igor Topolic, said: “All this is a farce for me. He [Mladić] is a Serbian national hero.”
Mladić’s home village of Bozinovici retains a street named after the former general, where he is praised as a symbol of defiance and national pride.
That’s what “national pride” does to people.
Even as a child I detested nationalism and it’s sibling jingoism. Even the common garden-variety patriotism makes me squirm. Having pride and amity towards the community of which you are part and the land in which you live can exist without any of that crap. I’ve also noticed that those who take nationalism and patriotism to greater than average lengths, are also the same people who are more inclined to be negative, even downright vicious, towards people in the community who are different from them; whether that be by dint of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, poverty or whatever. I guess it’s a world view that’s more about splitting than gathering.
Mladic can rot in jail.
The cause of the atrocities committed in the Balkans is somewhat more complicated than ‘national pride’. People might conceive an animus towards the “Other”, however that’s a very simplistic view of the situation. It’s another phase in a war that’s continued for 700 years since the Ottomans invaded and conquered the Balkans. I noticed that Mladic called the Bosnians “Turks”, there’s a sense of unfinished business, ie not all the Muslims have been ethnically cleansed.
Well of course it’s more complicated than a two-word phrase. But “National Pride” and the whole panoply of ideas and attitudes that go with it are very hard to separate from hostility to those outside The Nation.
I think it’s a two-way street, Ophelia. The national pride of an oppressed people is generally a force for good. That of an oppressor people, inclined to pride in their own imperialism no matter how dinky small, is not good.
People confined into the separate valleys of mountainous areas have a funny way historically of having disputes with, and contempt for ‘foreigners’ from other valleys: witness Scotland, Afghanistan and the Balkans.
The Serbs have been inclined to fall into that trap, even though once sufficiently oppressed themselves by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to get out from under by starting World War 1.
I’m not sure it really is the national pride of an oppressed people that’s a force for good – I think it’s the resistance to oppression that is. The two are linked, of course, but they can also be teased apart.
^ Wisdom. Rare. Thank you.
Ophelia,
I’m not convinced that democratic polities can function without the cohesion provided by national pride or some kind of collective sentiment. It’s a matter of degree of course. How does an oppressed people resist oppression without a sense of solidarity? India is an example of how a sense of shared identity defeated colonial oppression.
Omar,
The culture isn’t a result of “falling into a trap”. For many regions that have been subject to constant invasions, strangers are often very bad news indeed. In Scotland the threat was from the Vikings or the English, in Eastern and Southern Europe, the Muslims, in Afghanistan, any invaders who were on their way to India.
Yeah, there are plenty of historical examples of oppressed peoples doing some pretty horrendous things once they get power over their former oppressors. All in the name of their sparkling new national/group pride/patriotism/whatever.
Doesn’t always happen of course, but it happens often enough that it should be a lesson.
Or they can invade and oppress people who never did them any harm, Israel is the result of that process.
In 1977, I stayed in a Scottish B&B run by the loveliest little old white-haired lady I had ever met. She told me that around her neighborhood and much wider afield, the Campbells of Argyll were regarded as worse than the English, thanks to the Massacre of Glencoe in 1692 (!)
(Other Campbells were not so bad, but still a bit suss.)
RJW – well there’s a lot of space between “national pride” and “some kind of collective sentiment.” National pride is nationalistic and thus by definition adversarial toward Foreigners. Collective sentiment can be universalist.
I’m not a fan of national pride either. There’s an essential distinction between the things that people do because it tends to make everybody better off and the things they do to mark themselves as different from the foreigners or “because it’s what our people has always done”. National sentiments of any kind tend to motivate people to squander significant resources on the latter kind of behaviors, even at the expense of the former kind. I’ve always thought one of the strangest crimes in the English dictionary was “Un-American”. There is no shortage of nationalistic stupidity and evil on my side of the pond either, but it would be so weird to hear something condemned as “Un-Norwegian” or “Un-Swedish”. :-S
No one wants to remember Ottoman imperialism, which aggravated hostility between Serbs and Croats. And we have the still-living memory of the Independent State of Croatia’s genocide against the Serbs during WWII.
And we still have Chomsky fans denying that Srebrenica even happened. Once NATO/the US intervened, the Serbs were magically transformed into Oppressed Freedom Fighters…
I can’t think of a better demonstration of the vacuousness of nationalism than the Serb/Croat split. The language and culture are essentially the same. But Serbs are Orthodox and write in Cyrillic, Croats are (violently) Catholic and write in Latin script.
Bjarte, yes, so have many of us Americans (thought one of the strangest crimes in the English dictionary was “Un-American”). The House Committee on Un-American Activities was a byword for right-wing nationalist repressive bullshit as long as it existed.
John – it’s Swift’s Big End v Little End all over again. I think he was satirizing the minutiae of religious differences rather than national ones, but it’s much the same thing. See also Montaigne.
I believe and maintain that all people, covering all races , ethnicities, sexes, genders etc have to be treated as being equal. Because they are creations of Nature, and we know damn well where the opposite view leads.
But all cultures are not equal, and cannot lay claim to any such equality. Cultures include many components, including traditional practices, religion, customs (particularly those relating to marriage, family and kinship). Some of these, being human and historical creations, are inevitably superior to others, and one does not have to read far in history and anthropology to realise that.
But people also have a tendency to believe from within their own culture and history that it is superior to all others, and are generally encouraged in this belief by tribal and national leaders. And that can lead on to disaster; though not inevitably.