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Shortly after he was first charged with crimes against humanity in July 1995, Ratko Mladic was asked what it felt like to be branded "a war criminal" by an international court. The Bosnian Serb military commander seethed with a mixture of barely controlled anger and contempt as he rejected the "idiotic accusations."
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"My people or I were not the first to start that war," he insisted, veins popping from his bloated red face. "I don't recognize any trials except the trial of my own people."
Seventeen years later, the once all-powerful general finally appeared this spring before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague to answer charges of genocide, persecution, extermination, unlawful attacks on civilians, and hostage-taking. Partially paralyzed on his right side and looking older than his 70 years, he is physically much diminished, a shadow of the man who became known as the "butcher of the Balkans" for the campaign of terror he waged against Bosnia's non-Serb population. But he is recognizably the same person -- proud, willful, and completely unrepentant.
Mladic flashed the thumbs-up sign as he entered the courtroom in May, nodded approvingly as he listened to some of the charges against him, and even clapped his hands when the prosecutor played audio clips of him bullying United Nations peacekeepers and ordering the shelling of civilian areas of Sarajevo. "It was as if he was saying that everything that he did was completely justified," Jasmina Mujkanovic, whose father was killed in the infamous Omarska concentration camp, told me.
Together with victim representatives like her, I was seated in the public gallery of the tribunal's high-tech courtroom. We could see everything that was going on, but we were separated from the accused by a thick pane of glass. It was probably just as well, as the mother of one of his victims found it impossible to restrain herself in the presence of their tormentor and made insulting gestures. Mladic replied with a threat, slowly drawing a finger across his throat.
Mladic's alleged crimes represent the greatest evil that has been perpetrated in Europe since World War II: the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, culminating in the coldblooded execution of more than 7,000 prisoners in Srebrenica. The West may have closed its eyes to worse atrocities in the past 70 years, but none in its civilizational backyard, a mere stone's throw from where the Holocaust laid bare Europe's pretensions to enlightenment. Which is exactly why I have spent the past 10 months investigating the case and traveling through the former Yugoslavia -- interviewing victims, witnesses, and perpetrators -- identifying what we now know about these atrocities and trying to uncover what we still don't two decades later.
Watching Mladic finally appear in court, I couldn't help thinking about another much-anticipated war crimes case, 50 years ago. Adolf Eichmann went on trial in Jerusalem in 1961 accused of crimes against humanity for his involvement in the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews. The most celebrated chronicler of the Eichmann trial was, of course, Hannah Arendt, who wrote a series of articles for the New Yorker that were eventually turned into a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. The book was subtitled "A Report on the Banality of Evil," a phrase that sought to explain how the ordinary, harmless-looking bureaucrat in the dock had committed such monstrous, out-of-the-ordinary crimes.
Mladic was never a harmless-looking bureaucrat. He was a general born for command who got his hands dirty -- and bloody -- on the battlefield. He was not simply a cog in the machinery of genocide: He set the machinery in motion and supervised every aspect of its operation. In the words of the late Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. diplomat who helped bring the three-and-a-half-year Bosnian conflict to an end, Mladic was "one of those lethal combinations that history thrusts up occasionally -- a charismatic murderer."
But even that does not fully explain Mladic and his motivations. When I lived in Belgrade during the final years of Tito's dictatorship in the late 1970s, I did not consciously divide my friends into Serb or Croat, Muslim or Christian. No one did. Tito's insistence on "brotherhood and unity," enforced when necessary by the army and secret police, along with collective pride in his refusal to kowtow to foreign powers, resulted in a sort of ethnic harmony. Even if it was imposed from above, that system had its true believers -- Mladic among them. So as I finally had a chance to look into Mladic's piercing blue eyes, I tried to understand how a man who ritualistically swore to defend Tito's achievements could have ordered the coldblooded execution of thousands.
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