Ratko Mladić dubbed the 'Butcher of Bosnia' dies at 84
Mladić, a Bosnian-Serb general, orchestrated the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars
Ratko Mladić, a former Bosnian-Serb general dubbed the 'Butcher of Bosnia', has died aged 84.
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The former general was found guilty of genocide by a UN court after orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars during the 1990s.
He had been serving a life sentence at a UN Detention Unit in The Hague since 2011, with his death confirmed by his lawyers on Thursday.
Mladić was found guilty following a lengthy trial of genocide, crimes against humanity, persecution, extermination, murder, terror, unlawful attacks on civilians and hostage-taking.
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Mladić's death was announced by Serbian public broadcaster RTS on Thursday.
The former general's health had deteriorated in recent years and was repeatedly hospitalised.
His passing comes after the Mladić's lawyers filed a request for an early release on humanitarian grounds last week.
The filing was seen to quote the detention unit’s doctors, detailing that his “overall condition has rapidly declined” and warning that his death “may occur at any time.”
It was a request that was subsequently denied.
When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia's Muslim-led secession, Mladic was picked to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the landlocked country.
In 1995, Mladić's troops slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
It marked Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.
Those killed were buried in mass graves, with some bodies later dug up and later taken to remote mountains in an bid to hide evidence of the murders.
The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness, daring and brutality in the Serb warrior tradition, once prized in the life-or-death partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.
In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water; were starved and raped in prison camps; were made to jump off a bridge and shot; and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas.
The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was "ethnic cleansing" — the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.
A tribunal found that Mladic, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
"I do not recognise this court," Mladic said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014.
When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 he shouted: "This is all lies, you are all liars!"