It's Not Just About Mladic

Ana Uzelac

Time slows, as if trapped by the dark blue curtains of the courtroom. The dim artificial light is reflected in the jugs of water as men and women dressed in black polyester gowns perform rituals and recite the court’s rules of procedure and evidence. 

There is some fidgeting and clearing of throats, and the steady drone of interpreters' voices through headsets.

The pain of many years is narrated in dry legal language, each act of destruction assigned its own label and numbered paragraph.

And despite the historic importance of these proceedings, and the occasional histrionic performances from a defendant, one feels the boredom beginning to set in – even as the former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic puts in his initial appearance.

In the years I have spent covering war crimes trials in The Hague, I have learned to savour that boredom, the whirr of the well-oiled legal machine as – day in, day out, witness after witness – it quietly weaves a solid body of facts about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. I have watched myths melt away under the pressure of accumulated evidence, malign attempt at obfuscations exposed, so that the story of how Serbia, the country where I was born, ended up creating so much grief is drawn out from all the denial, lies and self-delusion.

What I have loved most about the cumbersome court procedure is the way it has reduced former masters of life and death to human proportions, the power they once wielded now measured in terms of individual responsibility for crimes committed on their watch.

This banal process of justice is now to be set in train against a man who still wields a mythic hold on the Balkans.

Mladic had only had a brief brush with the tribunal last week, but soon he will be exposed to all the procedural wrangling, the rebuttals of witnesses, arcane legal language, unwieldy trays of piled-up evidence, bad filter coffee and malfunctioning projectors.

He will become a subject of legal proceedings, in need of a lawyer and a pair of reading glasses.

Another reason why I am looking forward to the slow process of demystifying his image is that I feel deeply uncomfortable about the speed and ease with which almost everyone involved – from victims to the authorities in Serbia and European Union officials – have moved to place the burden of responsibility for one of the worst chapters in modern European history onto the shoulders of this one ageing figure.

This line of thought was articulated in a recent Bloomberg piece in which Bosnian writer Alexander Hemon warned that “General Mladic’s project for a Greater Serbia has failed, but his project of destroying Bosnia still has a good chance of succeeding”.

This is to give undue credit to an important actor – but not the main one – in a bloody political spectacle sponsored, directed and produced by a much larger company.

General Mladic is accused of running a criminal military campaign of a kind not seen in Europe since the Second World War. It conprised the three-year siege of Sarajevo, which included deliberate and sustained attacks on civilians, a campaign of ethnic cleansing in eastern and northwestern Bosnia, and the first genocide on European soil since the Holocaust.

But Mladic’s actions as head of the Bosnian Serb military were only possible because there was a structure in place that allowed them to happen, and that required someone like him to fulfill its ambitions. The Greater Serbia in which Mladic believed was not his project alone – it was backed by Serbian academics and demagogues, by its sophisticated political, economic and military institutions, and saddest of all, by a nation vacillating between wholehearted endorsement of the project and blind indifference to it, and to the suffering it caused.

Previous trials have already uncovered the extent of political and financial support that Mladic and his army received from Serbia. The Bosnian Serb military was financed, and its officers appointed and promoted through a clandestine section of the army of the rump Yugoslav state.

After he was indicted by the Hague tribunal, Mladic escaped capture only because there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals in the administration of the new democratic Serbia, including in the highest echelons of power, who actively protected him, provided him with false identities, sheltered him in military army barracks and paid him a pension until 2005.

Within Serbia, it may be that not everyone was aware of the scale of the destruction in Bosnia, the pain inflicted on other ethnic groups or the systematic manner in which it was done in their name.

But the conflict could not have happened without broad consensus among Serbs, in Bosnia and Serbia alike, that it was essentially acceptable to do harm to others in pursuit of ethnic purity and territorial unification. And when the architect of the former Yugoslav wars, Slobodan Milosevic was finally deposed as Serbian president in 2000, he was being punished by his people not for starting the fight, but for losing it.

While Mladic’s arrival in The Hague is certainly an important achievement in the formal process of justice, real human justice remains elusive. The lives destroyed by the Greater Serbia plan, the irreversible changes to Bosnia’s ethnic composition, and the deep festering wounds that the war left in Bosnian society need more than this or any other trial can achieve if they are to heal.

What is needed is for Serbia to acknowledge that previous administrations supported an essentially criminal project, to distance itself publicly from the ideology that fuelled this, and to develop an alternative set of values and different regional policies to replace those inherited from the nationalists of the past. Belgrade would also have to abandon any colonial aspirations with regard to Bosnia, and instead help it develop into a properly functioning home for Serbs living there – a home in which they would have not only rights but also obligations.

I sincerely hope that proceedings in Case No IT-09-92-I soon become mundane and tedious, and that Balkan leaders finally have no choice but to focus on the real challenge ahead – mitigating the consequences of the deeds of which Mladic now stands accused, and ensuring that the project to destroy Bosnia – his, but not his alone – falls unspectacularly, boringly flat.

Ana Uzelac, a former editor of IWPR’s Tribunal Update, is a Hague-based policy analyst specialising in state-building, post-conflict reconstruction and transitional justice.

The views expressed in this article are not necessarily the views of IWPR.