When former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic first appeared before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague to be indicted on 11 charges including genocide and war crimes, he demonstrated his contempt for the court by saluting with his left hand. Yesterday, the trial proper finally got under way after his lawyers had failed both to have the Dutch senior judge removed and a six-month delay in proceedings, on the grounds that they needed more time to examine documents and prepare their defense. Seventeen years after the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica, the worst European atrocity since the Second World War, is long enough for the widows and orphans of Bosnia-Herzegovina to wait for justice. Given that The Hague trial of Mladic's political boss Radovan Karadzic is still going on three years after it started, there will be time enough for the Bosnian Serb's legal team to examine all the documents they like. The 69-year-old Mladic cuts a worn but still defiant figure in the dock. He seems oblivious to the enormity of the crimes of which he is accused in pursuit of the ethnic cleaning of Serb-claimed areas of Bosnia during the 1992-95 war. These left 100,000 people dead and 2.2 million others homeless. The nearly four-year siege of the capital Sarajevo, during which shelling from Bosnian-Serb artillery and sniper fire from the surrounding hills caused 10,000 civilian deaths, was a calculated act of barbarity that Mladic is alleged to have ordered. For the families of the Bosnian and Croat victims of the onslaught, the harrowing evidence to come may perhaps bring closure of a sort. However, the total lack of repentance, not simply from Karadzic and Mladic but from Bosnian Serbs, who still consider both men to be heroes, will leave many wounds unhealed. Indeed the continued rejection by the Serbian community of Bosnia of any guilt, is one of the most disturbing and reprehensible elements of this tragedy. In Serbia itself, there at least is a muted recognition that ultra-nationalists led the country to commit hate crimes in Croatia and later Kosovo while the then dictator Slobodan Milosevic actively encouraged the Bosnian Serbs in their brutal ethnic cleansing. The court will hear of the failure of a small contingent of Dutch troops to protect the people of Srebrenica. Mladic's lawyers will undoubtedly seek to revive the humiliation of this lack of will to challenge the overwhelming Bosnian Serb forces surrounding the supposed safe haven. For many Bosnians, this may be the most compelling part of the trial. The Dutch capitulation following Mladic's assurances that all the town's inhabitants would be protected, and the subsequent segregation of and cold-blooded butchery of some 8,000 men and boys, was the final trigger that caused NATO to intervene decisively and led to the Dayton peace accord. Unfortunately one key question is unlikely to be addressed in the trial, because the answer is so shameful for all concerned. This question is: why did the international community wait so long before stopping these thugs in their tracks ? __
