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During the war in Bosnia, from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces carried out some of the conflict's worst atrocities against civilians. General Ratko Mladic, known to many as the Butcher of Bosnia, commanded those forces. He was arrested in 2011 and convicted of war crimes and genocide six years later. Mladic died today in a prison in The Hague where he was serving a life sentence. He was 84 years old. Tom Gjelten covered the war in Bosnia for NPR.
TOM GJELTEN, BYLINE: As commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, Ratko Mladic oversaw the three-year siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital. Ten thousand people died there, including 1,500 children. Across Bosnia, in towns and villages Serbs claimed as their own, Mladic directed a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing, creating Serb-only communities. All told, nearly a million non-Serbs were displaced and as many as a hundred thousand were killed. As NPR's correspondent, I witnessed or heard about many horrific incidents. A Muslim woman named Sefika Demirovic speaking through an interpreter, told me what happened in her village.
SEFIKA DEMIROVIC: (Through interpreter) We had 10 minutes to come together on a football ground. We walked, and there were six or seven bodies in front of us. We had to walk over them. It was all bloody. We didn't know who it was. We had to have our hands up with a white flag in front of us.
GJELTEN: Sometimes surrender with a white flag was not an option. In the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic was held responsible for the murder of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys. At the time, more than 25,000 Muslim refugees had crowded into the town, allegedly under U.N. protection. They had fled nearby villages as the Bosnian Serb Army swept through. On his arrival in Srebrenica, Mladic told a TV crew from Belgrade, we present this city to the Serbian people as a gift.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Non-English language spoken).
GJELTEN: Shortly thereafter, on Mladic's orders, the Serb forces rounded up all the Muslim men and boys they could find, tied and blindfolded them, and marched them to the edge of open pits where they were shot. Their bodies tumbled into mass graves. A year later, investigators began exhuming the victims' remains bone by bone. I was there in March 1996, when then U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright came to see for herself.
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GJELTEN: The suspected grave site is at the edge of a shallow ravine just behind a farm outbuilding. Tribunal investigators first visited the site this week, accompanied by NATO troops. When they returned with Ambassador Albright this morning, they saw that the ground around the site had been freshly bulldozed as if an attempt were being made to cover up evidence.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: There's a lot - some ground movement here.
GJELTEN: Even with the plowing, it was obvious there'd been some kind of mass burial at the farm. As Ambassador Albright picked her way gingerly through the muddy field, a forensic expert from the war crimes tribunal pointed out bits of bone and other human remains lying on the surface of the ground.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Back here, we still have some intact tissue. You can see the shoe. Appears to be vertebrae.
GJELTEN: Albright shook her head and sighed at the sight of a hand sticking out of the soil and a piece of human skull. Speaking to reporters afterwards, she said she was overwhelmed with horror at the sight.
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MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I have spent some time on farms, and I'm actually used to seeing bones, but I have never stood so close to human bones - pieces of cranium and then a body that actually is decomposing. It's the most disgusting and horrifying sight for another human being to see.
GJELTEN: For the Srebrenica massacre, for the siege of Sarajevo and for other atrocities committed on his orders, the war crimes tribunal charged Mladic with genocide and crimes against humanity. He went into hiding, protected by friends in Serbia. He was finally captured in 2011 and given a life sentence in 2017. Born into poverty in the former Yugoslavia, in 1942, General Mladic was regarded for a time by his fellow Serbs as a folk hero, but Serbian forces ultimately assisted in his capture.
For NPR News, I'm Tom Gjelten.
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