‘Butcher of Bosnia’ Ratko Mladic — Convicted of Genocide for 1995 Massacre — Dead at 84
Ratk Mladic, right. (AP Photo/Enric Marti, File)
Ratko Mladic — known as the “butcher of Bosnia” for overseeing the 1995 massacre of 8,000 people — died Thursday while in United Nations custody. He was 84.
Mladic died in a prison hospital in The Hague, the U.N. said in a statement.
The reviled Mladic, who spent 14 years as a fugitive after the devastating wars in the nation then known as Yugoslavia, had suffered strokes and other health problems in recent years, according to reports, and was denied medical release in May.
Judge Graciela Gatti Santana, the head of the United Nations’ directed “a full inquiry into the circumstances” of Mladic’s death, The Guardian reported.
In July 1995, Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serbian Army, which invaded the small town of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, ultimately taking thousands of Bosnian Muslim boys and men to abuse, torture and execute. The community had been deemed a United Nations “safe area” when Mladic’s army invaded.
The bodies were bulldozed into mass graves. At the time the mass killing was considered the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein once labeled Mladic the “epitome of evil” for his role in the Balkan war, which left more than 100,000 dead and more than 1 million homeless.
Mladic — who once directed his army to “scorch the brains” of Bosnian Muslims and at another point, declared himself a “Serbian God” — was taken into custody in 2011.
Mladic was convicted in 2017 of genocide and war crimes.
“Everything you said is pure lies. Shame on you!” he yelled after his conviction.
Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein declared after Mladic’s conviction that he was “the epitome of evil.”
Mladic’s son, Darko, was en route to The Hague after his father’s death, according to PBS News.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour — who rose to prominence with her coverage of the war — recalled the conflict and spoke Thursday of her face-to-face interview with Mladic.
“He did not like my reporting,” she noted.
“And it reminds me that we, the journalists, did our jobs,” she told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga while asserting “this is happening again. Russia is trying to do the same thing in Europe.”
“We kept this horror in everybody’s sight in technicolor live television at the end of the 20th century, so that nobody could say we didn’t know. I am proud of all the journalists who covered these crimes in real time and didn’t let the West turn away, and built the ledger of evidence and accountability,” she wrote.
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