Thursday, July 5 7:25 PM SGT Ratko Mladic: Western villian, Serbian hero BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina, July 5 (AFP) - Still on the run despite being wanted for crimes against humanity, Ratko Mladic remains a hero to the Serbian people but will always be associated in Western eyes with the massacre of thousands of civilians after the fall of Srebrenica. Mladic, 58, was not only the architect of what has been considered the worst incident of genocide in Europe since the end of World War II, a crime for which he was indicted back in 1995, but was also behind the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo which claimed another 10,000 lives. And it was all done in the name of "Greater Serbia", a fact which made him a hero to his people and a one-time favourite of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. Mladic, the subject of an international arrest warrant since 1996, now finally looks likely to follow his mentor into the dock at the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague, as Bosnian Serb Prime Minister Mladen Ivanic is reportedly ready to hand him over. But Ivanic claims not to know where Mladic is, although he was last sighted in Belgrade in October last year around the time of Milosevic's fall. Mladic is generally considered to have returned to the Republika Srpska (RS) and gone into hiding again, possibly under the protection of the army he once commanded. Born on March 12, 1943, in Bozinovici in eastern Bosnia, Mladic was two years old when his father was killed by Croatia's World War II fascist authorities, the Ustashe. But the general accuses the Muslims of worse horrors. They "impale Serbs, burn them alive, crucify them and put out their eyes," he is quoted as saying -- using the bloodthirsty language that so characterised the Bosnian war. In June 1991, when war broke out in Croatia, Mladic, then a colonel in the Yugoslav army based in Pristina, was given the job of organising the separatist Serb militias at Knin in Croatia. The following May, Mladic, by now a general, was made commander of the Bosnian Serb forces and fought to link Serb-held lands in eastern and western Bosnia. Mladic stands indicted as a war crimes suspect after his troops overran the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia on July 11, 1995. According to international organisations, an estimated 8,000 people were killed in subsequent massacres at Srebrenica. For many international observers, the stocky, ebullient Mladic was the epitome of Serb defiance and it took the combined might of NATO warplanes and cruise missiles to blow apart his military advantage when he refused to bow to Western demands to withdraw his heavy weapons from around Sarajevo in September 1995. Never just a simple soldier, Mladic is credited with considerable political muscle within the Bosnian Serb leadership and was never shy of using it, but he became too much of a liablity even for the former RS president, Biljana Plavsic, who sacked him in 1997. Mladic has even been credited with influencing the Bosnian Serb parliament to reject a peace plan proposed by international mediators Lord David Owen and Cyrus Vance in 1993. Chillingly, he is alleged to have said: "Borders are always drawn in blood and states marked out with graves." Mladic and his generals have never accepted subordination to the political leadership and in August 1995, the entire general command united against then-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who had tried to wrest control of the army from Mladic. Karadzic sacked Mladic but was forced to reinstate him. In October of the same year, Karadzic fired four generals but the move was never implemented. Mladic became a reclusive figure in post-war Bosnia, and for a long time holed up in his main command bunker at Han Pijesak, calmly defying NATO attempts to arrest him, as he regularly threatened to bathe in blood any soldiers who attempted to detain him. STOP NOVOM SVETSKOM PORETKU ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?bUrBE8.bVKZIq Or send an email To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] This email was sent to: archive@jab.org T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
