Ratko Mladic first appearance at Hague war crimes tribunal – live updates

Former Bosnian Serb general facing genocide charges appears in UN court following arrest last week 8.40am: If you want to watch the hearing and don’t have access to a TV channel showing it then the ICTY has a live video stream of this morning’s hearing, accessible on the front page of its website . 8.29am: One final bit of historic context before the hearing starts. Peter Beaumont has been hearing the stories of three people who suffered at the hands of Mladic’s forces. They’ll hopefully be giving their reactions after this morning’s court session. • Satko Mujagic, Omarska prisoner At the age of 20 Satko Mujagic, who now works for the Dutch government, was held prisoner in the notorious Omarska concentration camp. I lived in the town of Kozarec. It was overrun 12 days after it was attacked by heavy weapons. I was 20 at the time and I had just finished at high school. I was a civilian but I spent 200 days in the camps including a military one. The person I was more happy to see arrested was Radovan Karadzic. I was in Turkey then. I was really excited because he was the brains behind what happened. I made a kind of jump when Mladic was arrested. I mean, he was the one who was carrying out the murders. The key thing to remember is the meeting he attended on May 12th in Banja Luka when Karadzic presented his six point plan. Mladic took the floor. He said: “You realise that this would be regarded by the international community as genocide?” He wasn’t saying I don’t want to do this. He was saying – look. Just so you know. That’s the crucial thing for me. He knew three years before Srebrenica. He knew what he was doing. Many people are bitter that it took so long and about the support he still has in Republica Srpska (the Bosnian Serb entity). A new generation of young Serbs think he is a hero despite all the people that he he killed. • Sadik Ahmetovic, Srebernica survivor Sadik Ahmetovic, now Bosnia’s security minister, was born in Srebrenica later to be the site of the worst atrocity of the Bosnian war when troops commanded by Ratko Mladic massacred 8,000 men and boys in the UN protected enclave. Ahmetovic was one of those who managed to escape on 11 July 1995, eventually reaching safety in Tuzla. I’d graduated from university in Tuzla but I spent the war in Srebrenica working in the hospital there. I cannot forget that time. Before the war it was a place of between 5-7,000 people but during the war the refugees increased the population to 40,000. The conditions were unimaginable, not even close to being fit for human life. It was insanitary, people were starving and in the hospital we did not have anything like what we need to do our jobs. The situation got worse in June and July of 1995. We were under attack and on July 11th like many people in the town I made the decision to try to escape. Those next 10 days trying to reach Tuzla were like scenes from hell. Somehow I managed to survive but 8,000 others were not so lucky and were executed and buried in mass graves. “It’s well known that Ratko Mladic was the commander of the forces then and that the Tribunal has called what happened genocide. Seeing him arrested I feel a kind of satisfaction on one level knowing that for me and for the families of the victims he is finally facing justice. There will be a legal process and he will answer for the charges. But his arrest could have happened much earlier. Then there is the knowledge that institutions in Serbia and individuals helped him escape. Where my feelings are mixed is that for many of us, our emotions were murdered in the long period until his arrest. It was 16 years of waiting. Many mothers who lost children died before he could be brought to justice. But it is important now that this is happening. We need the truth as well as justice to help build more trust in the future and for reconciliation to take place. • Nihad Kresevljakovic, lived through the siege of Sarajevo Nihad Kresevljakovic lived through the siege of Sarajevo during which 10,000 residents were killed during a campaign of often indiscriminate shelling and sniping. He is now executive producer of Sarajevo’s MESS International Theatre Festival. There’s no doubt that this is a moment of huge significance but I don’t feel euphoric about it. I mean, the experience of living through the siege – being shelled by Serb cannons, being without communications or electricity – it felt like a fight for existence. People were being killed in the streets, and after the command of the Bosnian Serb forces was given to Mladic it became more aggressive. It’s too late for euphoria. Too many things have happened. When Karadzic was arrested there were people on the street. For me, as someone who spend tiome in Sarajevo during the siege, it was not just the shells from his forces being fired at the city, it was Mladic’s statements on television that I remember as well. He was a crazy man. What bothers me is the number of supporters that he has in the other entity [Republika Sprska]]. There is a new generation that has grown up that treats Ratko Mladic as a hero. He is talked about in the media there as a good soldier but he was not. He had no ethics. He was a criminal. But we should be very careful. Ratko Mladic is just the personification of a whole system. For himself, he looks ill and weak. It is good to see how slowly he walks and the difficulty with which he talks, because Mladic was a myth and this breaks the myth of him. But justice too cannot be satisfied until it Serb aggression is not only proven but Serbs also realise that they were the aggressors. Then we will be able to live as good neighbours. And when there is no longer a minority of Serbs who think people like Ratko Mladic are cool guys. 8.29am: Mladic has arrived at the court complex, the BBC is reporting. 8.20am: I’ve just spoken to Robert outside the court building in The Hague. He talks through what’s likely to happen at today’s hearing and discusses meeting relatives of those killed at Srebrenica, who have come to the Netherlands to watch from the public gallery: There are six women survivors of Srebrenica here. Between them they’ve lost dozens of people, including their children and extended family members… One lady I spoke to explained how she’d begged Mladic face to face at the time of Srebrenica about her sick son, saying he was too sick to be taken away. He was taken away and she’s never found even a bone of his body, she’s said subsequently. 8.05am: Earlier this week Robert went to see the courtroom where Mladic will appear: The stage for Mladic’s first appearance on the international stage after 16 years on the run will be Court One of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in the Hague. It is the showcase court in an austere building dedicated to trying those suspected of crimes committed in the former Balkan state since 1992. The court room is divided lengthways into two with seating for 99 people in a public gallery on one side of a full height glass divide and the lawyers, suspects and judges on he other. I dropped into the gallery on Wednesday before Serge Brammertz, the court’s lead prosecutor, gave his press conference. No mobile phones are allowed, you need a pass and there is a bag and body scan before you can get in. I sat down with a smattering of others three or four yards away from Radovan Karadzic, the former president of the Bosnian Serb republic who is facing similar charges to Mladic, and watched a few minutes in the life of a trial that had already been running for 18 months. Karadzic, wearing a smart black suit, pressed white shirt and black shoes yawned and itched, possibly picked, his nose as he followed the prosecutor’s case against him. When documents were referred to he fiddled with a computer mouse and cross-checked on one of two flat computer screens in the desk in front of him. He looked like a businessman sitting through a not particularly interesting seminar, rather than a suspected genocidal war criminal. Just a yard behind him and to one side sat a female guard. Mladic is likely to sit in the same spot as Karadzic today, but this time the gallery will be packed. 8.03am: This is our story ahead of the hearing from today’s paper , by Robert Booth in The Hague, which also touches on claims by Mladic’s defence that the former general has been treated for cancer. 8.00am: About an hour from now, following 16 years on the run and eight days after he his arrest at a Serbian village, Ratko Mladic is, at long last, to face legal redress for his alleged key role in the Europe’s worst human rights atrocity since World War II. At 10am Dutch time (9am BST) the former general who led Bosnian Serb forces during the brutal 1992-1995 conflict which broke apart the former Yugoslavia is due to appear before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia , the UN-established body which is already trying Radovan Karadzic , Mladic’s former political master. Why is this such an important moment? Those perhaps too young to recall the horrors of the conflict should begin with the Guardian’s July 1995 eyewitness reports of the Srebrenica massacre , during which forces allegedly under Mladic’s command massacred over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. Alternatively you could watch this BBC interview with Kemal Pervanic , among those treated appallingly in the Omarska concentration camp . Mladic will this morning be arraigned on 11 charges, among them genocide and crimes against humanity. Here is the full ICTY indictment against him from October 2002 (pdf file). Following his arrest, and an unsuccessful appeal against extradition, Mladic was flown to The Hague on Tuesday afternoon . Today will be his first opportunity to plead, and the expectation is the former general will deny the charges. “Whatever was done in Srebrenica, he has nothing to do with it. His orders were to evacuate the wounded, the women and the children and then the fighters,” Mladic’s son, Darko, said as his father fought extradition. It’s also clear that a number of people in Serbia still back their former military hero. As news of his arrest spread, thousands of people rallied in Belgrade to protest, fighting running battles with police . Ratko Mladic Serbia Bosnia and Herzegovina United Nations Europe War crimes Peter Walker guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 3, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.