Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander in charge when 8,000 men and boys were massacred after his men overran Srebrenica, once described his war crimes trial at the Hague as "monstrous and obnoxious." As the case against the 74-year-old comes to an end with closing arguments beginning this week, it must be wondered if Mladić has ever reflected on what he did. He has been on trial for genocide in Srebrenica and war crimes and crimes against humanity including the two-year siege and bombardment of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo. Proceedings in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) began in June 2011. The case, which in most people's book was open and shut, has ground on through various delays, with the prosecution seeking to demonstrate that not only was Mladić the commander but that he gave specific orders for ethnic murders, the bombardment of helpless civilians, illegal detentions, torture and extrajudicial killings. By all accounts, Mladić has seemed unrepentant. He was removed from the courtroom when he began to interrupt witnesses explaining the horrific timeline of events in Srebrenica. When he fell ill, he was cared for in a Dutch prison hospital. Throughout, the judges have treated him with the respect due to an innocent man until proven guilty, albeit that respect has sometimes been icy cold. Did Mladić consider for one moment that the manner in which he was being handled was a complete and utter remove from the barbarous way he and his men had behaved toward Bosnian Muslims? His trial is the outcome of an obscene conflict where the enmities run dark and deep, where Serb hatred of Muslims is rooted in their defeat by Ottoman Turks at the battle of Kosovo no less than six centuries ago, and the subsequent decision of many fellow Slavs in Bosnia to convert to Islam. Second only to Serbian hatred of Islam was its abhorrence of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg empire that long vied with the Turks for control of the Balkans. The Ottomans and the Hapsburgs are long gone, but the visceral enmity they engendered live on in men like Mladić and his political master Radovan Karadžić sentenced by the ICTY to 40 years in jail. Mladić will be the last person to be tried by the ICTY, which, since it began its work in 1993, has tried 104 cases, which have seen 83 convictions and 19 acquittals. In the early days there was a marked reluctance by the NATO powers that finally brought an end to the slaughter in Bosnia to pursue the men responsible for the savagery, the great majority of whom were Serbs. The court issued sealed warrants which NATO members refused to execute. The fear was that grabbing all but the lowest order war crimes suspects would destabilize the uneasy peace that NATO had brought. It was only when the British began arrests and the Serbian government was persuaded to hand over the architect of the whole horrible slaughter, its former president Slobodan Milošević, that the dam finally burst and the suspects were arrested one by one. The victims of Serb aggression have had to wait a quarter of a century for justice to be done but in the end, the likes of Mladić have been brought to trial for the most terrible crimes on European soil since Hitler's Nazis 70 years ago.
