Ratko Mladic arrested in Serbia

[Isgrimnur]

The Beeb

Fugitive Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic has been arrested in Serbia after 16 years on the run. Gen Mladic, 69, was found in a village in northern Serbia where had been living under an assumed name. He faces charges over the massacre of at least 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

Serbian President Boris Tadic said the process to extradite the former Bosnian Serb army chief to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was under way.
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The detention, President Tadic said, brought the country and the region closer to reconciliation, and opened the doors to European Union membership. Mr Tadic also rejected criticism that Serbia had been reluctant to seize Gen Mladic.

"We have been co-operating with the Hague tribunal fully from the beginning of the mandate of this government," he said.
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He was seized in the province of Vojvodina in the early hours of Thursday, Serbian Justice Minister Slobodan Homan told the BBC.

Serbian security sources told AFP news agency that three special units had descended on a house in the village of Lazarevo, about 80km (50 miles) north of Belgrade. The house was owned by a relative of Gen Mladic and had been under surveillance for the past two weeks, one of the sources added.

Gen Mladic was reportedly using the assumed name Milorad Komodic.
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Gen Mladic was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague in 1995 for genocide over the killings that July at Srebrenica - the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II - and other alleged crimes.

Having lived freely in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.

[Holman]

Do they still do gallows at the Hague?

[tjg_marantz]

Yeah, but where's Kim? I betcha she's in trouble and we're going to have to release him...

[Rip]

Wow, the summer is really starting off bad for international fugitives. We should start a pool for who will get nailed next.

[AWS260]

Wow, the summer is really starting off bad for international fugitives. We should start a pool for who will get nailed next.

I'll take "Not Roman Polanski."

[Holman]

Wow, the summer is really starting off bad for international fugitives. We should start a pool for who will get nailed next.

Now that Obama has tasted blood, he'll be shoveling extra resources towards high-profile targets. If I were Al-Zawahiri, I'd be watching my back between now and November 2012.

But my money is on SAS or French special forces bringing in Qaddafi with one of his legs shot off.

[Remus West]

Wow, the summer is really starting off bad for international fugitives. We should start a pool for who will get nailed next.

I'll take "Not Roman Polanski."

Is there a 13 year old girl fugitive we can get into the same vicinity as Polanski? Cause I'll bet on her being the next.
bad taste I know but I had to say it

[LawBeefaroni]

So will Bosnia/Lazarevo get the Pakistan treatment? He was living at his cousin's house without any kind of disguise except for a name change (was it an anagram in Serbian, BTW?).

[Rip]

I will take Dawood Ibrahim Kaskar.

[Isgrimnur]

It's generally a bad thing when you forget to turn hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence over to the defense team.

[Isgrimnur]

Radovan Karadzic

A United Nations court has convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide and nine other charges and sentenced him to 40 years in prison.

The conviction, made overnight, relates to Karadzic orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia's 1992-95 war that left 100,000 people dead.

As he sat down after hearing his sentence, Karadzic slumped slightly in his chair, but showed little emotion. He plans to appeal the convictions.

The UN court in the Hague, Netherlands found Karadzic guilty of genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which 8000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Europe's worst mass murder since the Holocaust.

Presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said Karadzic was the only person in the Bosnian Serb leadership with the power to halt the genocide, but instead gave an order for prisoners to be transported from one location to another to be killed.

In a carefully planned operation, Serb forces transported Muslim men to sites around the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and gunned them down before dumping their bodies into mass graves.

Kwon said Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, intended "that every able-bodied Bosnian Muslim male from Srebrenica be killed."

[Jeff V]

A less than 7 days per person killed. Seems a reasonable sentence.

[Isgrimnur]

40 years is 14,600 days. Divided by 8,000 is 1 day, 19 hours, 48 minutes per.

[Isgrimnur]

Well, he got a dorm named after him:

Bosnian Serb officials have named a student dorm after wartime leader Radovan Karadžić only days ahead of a Hague-based war crimes court is expected to find him guilty for his role in the 1990s conflict.

A plate with Karadžić’s name was unveiled by Milorad Dodik, the president of the Bosnian Serb-run entity, Republika Srpska, at a ceremony attended by several hundred people, including Karadžić’s wife Ljiljana and daughter Sonja, Bosnian Serb public broadcaster RTRS reported.

“We dedicated this place to the man who undoubtedly set the foundation of Republika Srpska – Radovan Karadžić, the first president of this republic,” Dodik said at the ceremony in Pale, a Bosnian Serb stronghold during the bloody 1992-1995 ethnic war.
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The peace agreement that ended the war divided Bosnia into two semi-independent entities, Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation.

[Jeff V]

40 years is 14,600 days. Divided by 8,000 is 1 day, 19 hours, 48 minutes per.

Which is less than 7 days (yeah, my math still sucked, and I even attempted to account for leap years -- you need 10 more days).

[Isgrimnur]

Yup. I didn't say you were wrong, just trying to get closer to more accurate numbers.

[Isgrimnur]

Acquittal

In a rare courtroom victory for a Serb defendant, a U.N. war crimes tribunal on Thursday acquitted ultranationalist politician Vojislav Seselj of atrocities and pronounced him a free man. The decision inflamed simmering tensions in the Balkans, sparking joy in Serbia and horror and deep anger in Bosnia and Croatia.

Prosecutors had charged Seselj, 61, with crimes including persecution, murder and torture and had demanded a 28-year sentence for his support of Serb paramilitaries during the region's bitter, bloody wars in the early 1990s.

But in a majority decision, the three-judge panel said there was insufficient evidence linking the politician himself to the crimes. A dissenting opinion shredded that logic, providing grist for possible future appeals.
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Seselj, who repeatedly branded the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia an anti-Serb court, was not in The Hague for the ruling. He was allowed to return home in late 2014 on compassionate grounds due to ill health.

Once home, the firebrand ultranationalist, who once said he would like to gouge out the eyes of rival Croats with a rusty spoon, rekindled a political career that was put on hold when he surrendered to the tribunal in 2003.

Now he could become a key political powerbroker after Serbia's April 24 general election. With a surge in pro-Russian and right-wing sentiments ahead of the vote, Seselj's Serbian Radical Party has a good chance to return to parliament after missing out two years ago.

Seselj has campaigned on the platform that Serbia must never enter the 28-nation European Union or NATO and should forge closer ties with Moscow. He has burned EU, NATO and Croatian flags during pre-election rallies, and said he would join a coalition government with the incumbent populists, his former allies, only if they give up their goal of EU accession.

The ruling could also further deteriorate relations between the two main Balkan rivals, Serbia and Croatia.
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Prosecutors have long cast wartime plans by Serb leaders including Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic as a criminal plot to create a "Greater Serbia" by forcefully expelling non-Serbs from their homes and thus redrawing the Balkan borders. Reading out a summary of the judgment, Presiding Judge Jean-Claude Antonetti characterized the plan as a political goal, not a criminal act.

The ruling called operations in which non-Serbs were bussed out of territory as a "humanitarian mission." Prosecutors had branded it a forcible displacement of the civilian population.

"The reading of the conflict by the trial chamber is very, very different to what we are used to," Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz told reporters, adding that Seselj's trial was beset by allegations of interference with witnesses and evidence.

Brammertz almost certainly will appeal, but said Thursday he first has to study the ruling, which runs to some 100 pages, and its dissenting opinion.

[AWS260]

Mladic convicted, sentenced to life in prison.

From 1992 to 1995, the tribunal found, Mr. Mladic, 75, was the chief military organizer of the campaign to drive Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs off their lands to cleave a new homogeneous statelet for Bosnian Serbs.

Along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, who was convicted on similar charges last year, Mr. Mladic was found to have orchestrated a campaign of so-called ethnic cleansing that made Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation of 4.5 million at the time, the site of some of the worst atrocities of Europe’s bloody 20th century.

The deadliest year of the campaign was 1992, when 45,000 people died, often in their homes, on the streets or in a string of concentration camps. Others perished in the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, where snipers and shelling terrorized residents for more than three years, and in the mass executions of 8,000 Muslim men and boys after Mr. Mladic’s forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica.

[Octavious]

My wife was in Brcko when this all started, which was pretty much the frontline. They had to bribe their way out of the city. Their house (a summer house they actually lived in Germany at the time) was blown up not long after they left. At one point they announced on loud speakers that people were free to leave via the bridge in town. They blew the bridge up when the people started crossing. I have heard so many horrible stories of what happened in that war. This guy deserves way more than just sitting in a cell for the rest of his life.

[Holman]

That is awful.

I've met a journalist who was in the former Yugoslavia during the war. It sounds like it was Hell.

[Isgrimnur]

Bosnian Croat war criminal dies after taking poison in court

Slobodan Praljak, 72, died in hospital, with the UN court announcing that the courtroom was now "a crime scene".

On hearing that his 20-year jail term had been upheld, the ex-commander of Bosnian Croat forces said he was not a criminal and then drank from a bottle.

In 2013, he was sentenced for crimes in the city of Mostar during the Bosnian war from 1992-95.
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They were attending the final appeals judgment to be handed down by the court.
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After hearing the verdict, General Praljak stood and raised his hand to his mouth, tipped his head back and appeared to swallow a glass of liquid.

"I have taken poison," he said.

[Holman]

Bosnian Croat war criminal dies after taking poison in court

Slobodan Praljak, 72, died in hospital, with the UN court announcing that the courtroom was now "a crime scene".

On hearing that his 20-year jail term had been upheld, the ex-commander of Bosnian Croat forces said he was not a criminal and then drank from a bottle.

In 2013, he was sentenced for crimes in the city of Mostar during the Bosnian war from 1992-95.
...
They were attending the final appeals judgment to be handed down by the court.
...
After hearing the verdict, General Praljak stood and raised his hand to his mouth, tipped his head back and appeared to swallow a glass of liquid.

"I have taken poison," he said.

Goerings gonna Goering.