Serbian General Ratko Mladic, sentenced to life in prison for war crimes in Yugoslavia, dies

Former Bosnian Serb commander General Ratko Mladic, who was sentenced to life in prison by a court in The Hague, has died. He was 84 and died in a detention center.

Reuters reports this.

In 2017, the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Mladic guilty of murder, crimes against humanity, terrorism, attacks on civilians and hostage-taking. He was found guilty on 10 of 11 counts in total for war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the 1995 genocide of Muslims in Srebrenica, in which some 8 000 people were executed.

Mladic is also found guilty of crimes against humanity and violations of the customs of war in connection with the four-year siege of Sarajevo, during which 11 000 civilians were killed.

Genocide in Srebrenica

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992–1995, Bosnia was embroiled in a civil war, as the country is home to three distinct ethnic groups: Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. The situation was further complicated by the fact that Bosniaks are Muslim, Croats are Catholic, and Serbs are Orthodox.

On July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serbs seized the UN-protected safe area of Srebrenica. They separated at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from their wives, mothers, and sisters and slaughtered them.

The International Court of Justice recognized the events in Srebrenica as genocide in February 2007. This mass killing of people on religious and ethnic grounds is still considered the largest in Europe since World War II.

Ratko Mladić was a general in the army of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić from 1992 to 1995, who is also serving a life sentence for the Srebrenica genocide. Mladić was arrested in 2011 and went on trial in May 2012.

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