Μake us preferred on Google Srebrenica, July 1995. Serb forces had just taken the mountain town in Bosnia, but General Ratko Mladic reassured thousands of terrified Bosnian Muslims that they would be safe.
In footage from that day, the general is seen playfully patting the cheek of an eight-year-old Muslim boy and offering him chocolate.
“Calm down,” he tells the crowd. “Let the women and children go first. Thirty buses will be here. We’ll take you to Kladanj. Be careful not to lose any children. Don’t be afraid. No one will harm you.”
A week later, more than 8,000 people from Srebrenica were dead.
According to the indictment from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), after the buses carrying Srebrenica’s women left that stifling July day, the men and boys were rounded up and slaughtered under Mladic’s direct orders.
Bosnian Serb forces later tried to destroy evidence, digging up the bodies and reburying them in scattered mass graves in remote areas.
Twenty-two years later, the ICTY ruled that Mladic, who died last Thursday at 84, had ordered the executions of all men of military age or those deemed old enough to carry weapons, ranging from 12 to over 70 years old. It was the worst massacre Europe had seen since World War II.
Timeline of the Srebrenica Massacre
Srebrenica, a predominantly Muslim town in eastern Bosnia, fell to Bosnian Serb forces shortly after the siege of Sarajevo began at the start of the Bosnian War in April 1992.
Displaced under a policy known as “ethnic cleansing,” Bosnian Muslim forces retook the enclave, but by year’s end it again became a target for the Serbs, who cut off road access.
On April 16, 1993, as the town came under tank and artillery fire, the UN Security Council declared Srebrenica a “safe area” under the protection of UN and NATO forces, and a year later, a 450-strong Dutch UN peacekeeping force was deployed to the enclave.
In early July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces attacked Muslim government positions to the south, east, and north of the enclave. They seized the peacekeepers’ positions on July 9, after taking roughly 30 hostages.
On July 11, NATO carried out airstrikes on two Serb tanks on the outskirts of Srebrenica, but that same day, Bosnian Serb forces led by Mladic captured Srebrenica, forcing tens of thousands of refugees to flee to the Dutch forces’ base in the village of Potocari, on the outskirts of the mountain town. With Srebrenica captured, Mladic ordered the evacuation of all civilians, while all men of fighting age were captured and slaughtered.
Testimonies began emerging from July 17 onward, as those who escaped recounted harrowing accounts of killings, torture, and rape by Bosnian Serb forces.
On July 24 and November 16, respectively, Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and Mladic were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
To date, 6,880 of the at least 8,300 victims have been identified and buried.
In 2017, Mladic was sentenced to life in prison by the court in The Hague, and international media branded him the “Butcher of the Balkans.”
He is also held responsible for other war crimes beyond the Srebrenica genocide. Under his command, the years-long siege of Sarajevo began at the start of the war, with the city under bombardment for more than 40 months, resulting in the deaths of roughly 11,000 people, including more than 1,600 children.
“No one can grasp the scale of the suffering Ratko Mladic is responsible for,” ICTY prosecutor Alan Tieger said in his closing argument.
Mladic himself, however, repeatedly denied any responsibility. He saw himself as an avenger of the Serbs for centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and viewed Bosnia’s Muslims as direct descendants of the Turks. In front of his soldiers, he referred to them simply as “Turks” and reportedly never showed any empathy.
“Borders are always drawn in blood, and states are marked by graves,” is one of the well-known phrases attributed to him.
