Ratko Mladić must get life sentence, say war crimes prosecutors

Prosecutors at The Hague war crimes tribunal have called for a life sentence to be imposed on the Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladić, for genocide and crimes against humanity committed by his forces in the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Mladic, 74, who was a senior officer in the Yugoslav army in 1991 when the socialist federation fell apart, is charged with two counts of genocide - part of the attempt to carve an ethnically pure Serb state out of multiethnic Bosnia - alongside political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was sentenced in March to 40 years' prison.

He commanded Bosnian Serb forces that cut the country in two when Bosnia declared its independence the next year and remained in command through the more than three years of war, in which 100,000 people died.

"It would be an insult to victims living and dead and an afront to justice to impose any sentence less than the severest available under the law - a life sentence", lead prosecutor Alan Tieger said, closing the prosecution’s case on Wednesday at the end of a trial that has taken more than four and a half years at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Mladić reportedly listened to the prosecutors’ closing arguments impassively, watching as they showed videos of him from the war, striding through captured towns, issuing orders to his soldiers.

“The time has come for Ratko Mladić to be held accountable for each of his victims and all the communities he destroyed,” Tieger said. “Nobody can even imagine the depth of suffering for which Mladić is responsible,” he added.

In their three-day closing statement, prosecutors played a recording of an intercepted radio conversation in May 1992 with one of his officers, in which Mladić ordered artillery fire on two Sarajevo districts “because not many Serbs live there”.

“Let’s drive them out of their minds, so they cannot sleep,” he is heard saying.

One of the prosecution lawyers, Adam Weber, told the tribunal that Mladić’s “personal approval … was necessary” for Serb forces to shell the city using a specially modified bomb that was hurled into central Sarajevo in the later stages of the war.

The second genocide count was for the slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. Most of them were taken away in buses after the supposedly UN-protected enclave fell to Mladić’s troops, lined up and shot, with their bodies dumped in mass graves.

"The time has come to take revenge on the Turks of this region," Mladić said on a television broadcast, played in court, on the eve of the fall of the enclave.

“There’s too much pain, there’s too much for any of us to truly comprehend the nature and scope of the shared misery of the women and survivors of the Srebrenica community,” prosecution lawyer Peter McCloskey said. “We can, however, strike back, as mandated by the security council with the creation of this tribunal to expose the horrific crimes of this war and try those most responsible for them.”

 “We have identified the key men responsible for it. We have Mladić in the dock answering for his crimes,” McCloskey added.

Mladić has pleaded innocent to the charges and his defence counsel will make its closing statements between 9 and 13 December. A verdict is expected next year.

The Mladić trial is one of the last cases to be heard by the ICTY, which was set up in 1993.

The Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadžić, is to appeal his 40-year sentence, which was issued by the court in March this year.