The 'Butcher of Bosnia' jailed for life

A UN tribunal yesterday convicted former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic of genocide and crimes against humanity for orchestrating massacres and ethnic cleansing during Bosnia's war and sentenced him to life in prison.

Mladic, 74, was hustled out of the court minutes before the verdict for screaming "this is all lies, you are all liars" after returning from what his son described as a blood pressure test which delayed the reading-out of the judgment.

The UN Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Mladic guilty of 10 of 11 charges, including the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica and the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 civilians were killed by shelling and sniper fire over 43 months.

The killings in Srebrenica of men and boys after they were separated from women and taken away in buses or marched off to be shot amounted to Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.

"The crimes committed rank among the most heinous known to humankind, and include genocide and extermination as a crime against humanity," Presiding Judge AlphonsOrie said in reading out a summary of the judgment.

"Many of these men and boys were cursed, insulted, threatened, forced to sing Serb songs and beaten while awaiting their execution," he said.

Mladic had pleaded not guilty to all charges. His legal team said he would appeal against the verdict.

The "Butcher of Bosnia" to his enemies and critics, Mladic was the most notorious of the ICTY's 161 indictees, along with former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic and late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

In its summary, the tribunal found Mladic "significantly contributed" to genocide committed in Srebrenica with the goal of destroying its Muslim population, "personally directed" the long bombardment of Sarajevo and was part of a "joint criminal enterprise" intending to purge Muslims and Croats from Bosnia.

Prosecutors said the ultimate plan pursued by Mladic, Karadzic and Milosevic was to purge Bosnia of non-Serbs - a strategy that came to be known worldwide as ethnic cleansing - and carve out a "Greater Serbia" in the ashes of Yugoslavia.

ICTY Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz called the verdict "a milestone" in holding Mladic accountable not just for mass killings but the detention of tens of thousands of non-Serbs in camps where many were beaten and raped, as well as the expulsion of hundreds of thousands to re-make Bosnia's demographic.