Genocide perpetrator meets his nemesis

Former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic was in 2017 jailed for life for genocide and other atrocities in the 1990s Bosnian war. He will remain in jail.

Mladic has lost his appeal against a 2017 conviction for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The UN court upheld the life sentence for his role in the killing of about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

Known as "the Butcher of Bosnia", Mladic led forces during the massacre of Bosniaks in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo. The UN tribunal in The Hague convicted him in 2017 on 10 of the 11 charges. The court delivered one small surprise in finding Mladić "not guilty" on one count of genocide relating to actions carried out by soldiers under his command in six municipalities starting in 1992. He was arrested in 2011 after 16 years on the run.

The end of the Mladić trial, during which 592 witnesses were heard and 10,000 exhibits were shown as evidence presented to the court, also marked the effective end of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY. Mladic, then 75, was not in court when the sentence was read out. He had been removed for shouting at the judges. Mladic denied all the charges and his lawyer promptly appealed the order. United Nations war crimes judges on June 8, 2021 upheld a genocide conviction and life sentence against former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, confirming his central role in Europe's worst atrocities since World War II.

The appeals chamber dismissed Mladic appeal in its entirety, dismissed the prosecution's appeal in its entirety and affirmed the sentence of life imprisonment imposed on Mladic by the trial chamber. As the court was told his name should be consigned to the list of history's most depraved and barbarous figures. Far from learning from it, far from regretting it, Bosnia is as divided as ever, nationalism is rampant, and denial of what happened there over a quarter a century ago is the norm among Bosnian Serbs, many of whom see Mladić as a hero.

None of the harrowing testimony provided over the years in The Hague has been able to dent that deliberate ignorance. The genocide has long been an inspiration for far-right extremists and Islamophobes. Most infuriating for survivors was the award of the 2019 Nobel Prize for literature to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. He had delivered a eulogy at the funeral of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević and made a number of revisionist statements about the events of the Bosnian war that have led to accusations of genocide denial.

The origins of genocide denial in Bosnia lie with a small group of Serbian nationalists, supported by part of the Serb political and media establishment. The post-war situation generated a stance within Serb culture that Serbs were the aggrieved side and that certain historical events had curtailed national goals. This denialism ranges from challenging the judicial recognition of the killings as an act of genocide to the denial of a massacre having taken place, and uses a variety of methods.