Mladic refuses to enter plea at War Crimes trial

Ratko Mladic, the Serbian Former General, refused to enter a plea at the international war crimes trial in The Hague this afternoon. He faces charges related to the Bosnian war from 1992-5, particularly allegations of genocide and mass-murder following events such as the massacre of 8,000 civilians in Srebrenica in 1995.

In a conflict that gave us the horrendous euphemism of "ethnic cleansing" (a phrase that overly sanitises a multitude of evils), Mladic is accused of one of the worst attrocities as part of a larger ideal of removing Bosnian Muslims from what the perpetrators believed should be Serb-only areas. The Bosnian war still has a power to haunt the minds of Europeans today as a point where the euphoria over the fall of Iron Curtain proved short-lived in the face of political turmoil and old hatreds burning what had once been Yugoslavia.

Growing up in the UK, the events in the Bosnian conflict took place when I was a child and the faces of Ratko Mladic, and others such as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, appeared like far distant boogeymen. Seeing the now apparently frail old man in The Hague today (far from the swaggering military man of the past) put a human face on the tragedy that I had not expected; that the man alleged to have orchestrated such terror was not some fairytale monster but a man of flesh and blood. However, this humanity does not excuse Mladic but rather serves as a warning that we must be active to prevent such horrors in the future as well as the importance of ensuring that justice be carried out.