Former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic, known as ‘the butcher of Bosnia’ and sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in war crimes in Bosnia, has died at the age of 83 after suffering several strokes while behind bars. The former military man was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of ten charges, including that of the genocide in Srebrenica. He had been in a prison in The Hague since 2017 for various crimes committed during the armed conflict (1992-1995).
It was his family who asked the court that he could receive treatment in Serbia and, once he died, who reported his death after having suffered a long and difficult illness. Other crimes for which he was imprisoned include the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo.
The ‘forced expulsion’ of thousands of people
As the newspaper El País reports, the Srebrenica massacre was the macabre culmination of a war that lasted more than three years, during which the general, now deceased, bombed Sarajevo daily; After this, 10,000 people died. The dead of Srebrenica were buried with bulldozers in mass graves. The objective of the Bosnian Serb Ratko Mladic and the rest of the army was none other than “ethnic cleansing” through the forced expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and, in general, non-Serbs.
Mladic’s defense denounces that they did not let him die in his country
The defense of former commander Ratko Mladic has denounced that the court did not agree to release him for humanitarian reasons so that he could spend his last days in Serbia with his family. His lawyers warned that in his final days they urgently requested Mladic’s release to receive palliative care at a medical institution in Serbia, a request that was not granted. The lawyers noted that their request “did not seek to alter the sentence or sentence,” but rather to allow Mladic to spend his final days “surrounded by his closest family members.”
