Defiant and unrepentant, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Friday, in a preliminary hearing during which he refused to enter a plea to the 11 counts against him — including genocide, extermination, and murder.
The once formidable general, stripped of his military uniform and wearing a dark grey suit, had to be supported by two United Nations guards and lowered into the defendant’s seat in Courtroom One. He saluted the public gallery with his left hand — his right hand having been partially paralyzed, most likely due to stroke — and needed assistance putting on his translation headphones.
But if the man accused of committing the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II at first appeared to be a shell of his former self — even telling the three judges, in somewhat slurred speech, that he was a “gravely ill man” — his steely-eyed defiance quickly surfaced. When presiding Judge Alphons Orie asked Mladic if he wanted to hear the charges against him, the former general replied: “I do not want to have a single letter or sentence of that indictment read out to me.”
. The charges include genocide, extermination, murder and deportation, for crimes spanning the whole of the 1991-1995 conflict: from the 44-month-long siege of Sarajevo to the 1995 hostage-taking of UN peacekeepers, to the genocide at Srebrenica in July that same year, when some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered over the course of five days.
Mladic listened intently as the charges were read out, often dabbing at his mouth or nose with a tissue, sometimes shaking his head “no,” such as when the Srebrenica charges were read out. At one point, he even turned to smile at the public gallery. Sitting in the third row were a handful of war survivors who had traveled across Europe to see Mladic in the dock. Separated by bulletproof glass from the man they hold responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, some shouted “butcher” and “monster.” Others cried softly.
“When they arrested [Mladic], I felt okay about it,” says Faroudin Alic, who survived the massacres at Srebrenica by escaping with a column of men through the forest to the safe town of Tuzla. “But now that I saw him, I feel worse. I can’t explain why, it’s just a strange feeling.”
