First Osama bin Laden, now Ratko Mladic. But while the Bosnian Serb commander enjoyed a profile nothing like that of the al-Qaeda leader, his was a considerably greater butcher’s bill.
For many Serbs, General Mladic, 69, is a war hero rather than a national disgrace.
But while he was still at large their country remained a European pariah. The intriguing question about his arrest concerns its timing and, as with Bin Laden, how many people in high places had known of his whereabouts all along.
The Butcher of Bosnia had been living a life of quiet obscurity in the village of Lazarevo, just 80km from the Serbian capital Belgrade, where he posed as just another retired soldier.
Although said to be in poor health after more than a decade on the run, he was carrying two pistols when he was seized last week by Serbian security forces, apparently acting on a tip-off. He failed, however, to carry out an earlier promise to go down fighting rather than be taken alive.
He will now be extradited to the Hague to stand trial for a litany of pitiless war crimes. Burly, brutish and unrepentant, Mladic was a key military player throughout the genocidal civil wars of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, which saw the deaths of 200 000 of its citizens.
But he is most notorious for his presiding roles in the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica, the latter the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. No exact figure can be put on the number of unarmed Bosnian Muslim boys and men who were executed when Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN haven in July 1995.
When Mladic stands in the dock at the international war crimes court in The Hague to hear his indictment read out, the murders will be put at more than 7 000. About 25 000 Muslim women, children and elderly were also expelled from the region.
It was the nadir of the ethnic cleansing military campaigns that marked the Yugoslav conflict. It is an irony that its perpetrator will now stand trial in the Netherlands, the country whose soldiers, operating under the UN flag, shamingly stood by and let the massacre take place.
Mladic was born in 1941 in a village near Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. His father was killed just before World War II ended, while taking part in a partisan attack on Axis forces.
Yugoslavia had been created at the end of World War I. It was a sprawling artificial compromise, knitted together by the exigencies of Great Power politics.
After World War II, only Tito’s communist dictatorship kept the federation of republics together.
By the late 1980s, after Tito, Yugoslavia’s many different ethnic groups – Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims and Albanians – were living in a state of increasing political, religious and ethnic tension.
In 1991, Slovenia ceded from Yugoslavia. Then the rest of the federation fell violently apart with first Croatia, then Bosnia-Herzegovina, following suit.
Serbia, the strongest power, was desperate to hold the fractious state together, or at least grab as much land as possible as it disintegrated.
Young Mladic had been a high-flying student at an army officer academy.
By the time Yugoslavia began to crumble, he was a deputy garrison commander fighting for territory against the forces of the breakaway Croat republic.
The following spring, largely Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Mladic was put in command of the Yugoslav federal forces, which closed a ring of armour and artillery around Sarajevo, the Bosnian Muslims’ new capital.
Thus began a bloody siege that was to last for nearly four years. “Burn their brains!” he once bellowed as his men pounded the city with artillery fire.
Bosnia-Herzegovina was itself riven by competing ethnic and religious groups. In May 1992, the ethnic Serbian-controlled part of Bosnia, which had split from the Sarajevo government, formed its own army.
Local boy Mladic was made its commander. His defining battle was to be his capture of the mining town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.
In April 1993, after a year of see-saw battles for control of the area, the outside world tried to intervene. The UN Security Council declared Bosnian Muslim-held Srebrenica and its environs to be a safe area and later as demilitarised.
It was nothing of the sort. The Serb grip tightened, conditions inside became critical and in March 1995 the Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic gave the order that Srebrenica be taken.
The offensive began on July 6. Dutch-manned UN observation posts either surrendered or were abandoned. Thousands of Bosnian Muslim refugees from outlying areas began to pour into the centre.
Mladic harangued his junior commanders and took hands-on control of the operation. By July 11, he was successful enough to be able to enter Srebrenica on foot, followed by a Serb TV crew. Footage shows him talking to the camera as if he were a presenter and guide.
By that evening about 30 000 terrified civilians had sought sanctuary at the UN compound at Potocari.
The Dutch UN battalion based there had done little to stem the advance of the Serbs, who threatened to harm the Dutch soldiers already taken prisoner.
What followed will remain a stain on UN peacekeeping and the Dutch military in particular. According to witnesses, under the very eyes of the UN soldiers, Serb troops under Mladic’s command began to move among the hysterical crowds around Potocari, carrying out sporadic executions, rapes and mutilations.
Girls as young as 12 are said to have been gang-raped. Children were reportedly decapitated, crying babies had their throats cut. Some refugees committed suicide to escape the cruelty.
By then Mladic had met the Dutch commander and told him that the Muslims must hand over any weapons they had or vanish. The Dutch officer drank a toast with him. His men, he said, would not interfere and were eventually allowed to leave, without their weapons or supplies (seven years later a Dutch cabinet resigned after a report on the affair).
The next day, the Serbs began to separate the women from the men. Mladic was caught on film blithely telling some refugees: “All who wish to go will be transported, large and small, young and old. Don’t be afraid, just take it easy. Let the women and children go first. No one will harm you.”
But a surviving witness claimed that the general then qualified this offer, saying the men would be killed and thrown into the nearby River Drina to feed the fish.
The women would be spared only so that they could suffer the knowledge of what had happened to their men.
Tens of thousands of women and very young or old men were put on buses and allowed to leave for Bosnian Muslim territory. But all men between puberty and about 75 were rounded up. Their fate had been sealed.
Over the next five days, the Muslim men died in mass executions that took place on farms, in social centres and warehouses, along river banks and in forests. Guns, rocket-propelled grenades, knives and axes were used.
One Serb soldier present at a massacre at Branjevo Farm recalled executions lasting from 10am to mid-afternoon.
One of his comrades boasted of killing between 200 to 300 men by himself. It was reminiscent of the Holocaust.
In an attempt to hide the atrocity, the bodies disappeared into mass graves. But no crime that large could be camouflaged.
That same year Mladic was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The charges detailed his responsibility for Srebrenica as well as crimes committed during the Sarajevo siege, including the deliberate targeting of civilians by snipers.
And yet he continued to live quite freely and in some comfort in Belgrade under the patronage of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. It was not until Milosevic fell in 2001 and democrats came to power that Mladic disappeared.
Milosevic died in custody in The Hague in 2006. Other regime comrades-in-arms gave themselves up or were captured and tried. Some, such as Karadzic, remained at large until relatively recently.
But Mladic seemed to lead a charmed existence, despite the millions of pounds of reward money on his head and periodic ill health.
While at large he came to embody the fracture between the old Serbia and the new, a haunting drag on his country’s rehabilitation. After all, his arrest and extradition was a condition of Serbia’s entry into the EU – a prospect that now looks much more likely.
To show willing, the Serbian government set up special units to find him.
But he had widespread support inside the country and a poll in March showed that more than half of the respondents opposed his extradition. Forty percent described him as a hero.
There has been much suspicion that elements within the intelligence services, military or among powerful sympathisers protected Mladic until his arrest yesterday in a cousin’s house.
He was not even wearing any disguise, but had aged considerably.
Such doubts are hardly allayed by the admission that the Bosnian Serb army had been paying him his pension until 2006.
So much for the masquerade.
The graves of Srebrenica have given up most, but not all, of their dead.
And, with the capture of the man in charge, the final act of that tragedy can now begin. – Daily Mail