RATKO Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general whose forces carried out the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War, has died in prison at age 84.
Serbian state RTS television and the official Bosnian Serb television have reported that Mladic, who was serving a life sentence for his crimes, died in a UN prison hospital in The Hague, in the Netherlands.
A family member of Mladic confirmed the reports to the Associated Press (AP) and said Mladic's son, Darko Mladic, was on his way to The Hague.
UN court officials told the AP in a statement that they could not immediately confirm Mladic's death.
The UN tribunal for war crimes committed during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s sentenced Mladic to life in prison in 2017 in what was considered a key step towards bringing justice to the victims. He had been in custody since 2011 after many years on the run.
The former communist officer-turned nationalist warlord was one of the most notorious figures of the conflict that left more than 100,000 people dead and more than one million homeless.
He commanded his troops to “scorch the brains” of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a “Serbian god”.
When the ethnic war in Bosnia started in 1992, Mladic became the commander of the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swaths of the country to form a Serb mini-state.
Serbs under his control laid siege to the capital, Sarajevo, and other cities and villages, established camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, and systematically killed prisoners.
In Sarajevo, Serb troops kept the city isolated while killing civilians with snipers.
In 1995, Mladic's troops killed more than 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica — the only post-Second World War case of genocide in Europe.
But Mladic himself and his admirers among the Serbs have never repented. Mladic acted bullishly during his trial and yelled at the judges when sentenced to life in prison.
Mladic was born March 12, 1942, in the tiny Bosnian village of Bozinovici, in the hills 25 miles (40km) south of Sarajevo. Like other protagonists in the Yugoslav conflict, he imbibed nationalism from his family’s fate in the Second World War — his own father was killed by Croats.
A communist-era officer, Mladic sided with the Serbs as Yugoslavia disintegrated in the war.
Mladic first led a Serb insurgency in Croatia before taking over the Bosnian Serb army that was backed by Serbia and then-president Slobodan Milosevic, who also died in the custody of the Hague court in 2006 while on trial for genocide.
Mladic was known for his obsession with his nation’s history. He saw Bosnia’s war as a chance for revenge against the one-time 500-year-long Ottoman occupation of Serbia.
He often referred to Bosnia’s Muslims as Turks and boasted of revenge when his troops overran the protected UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
Carried away by Serb dominance in firepower and international ignorance, Mladic was convinced of his final victory.
“The time has come… for revenge against Turks in these regions," Mladic said after taking over Srebrenica.
A UN “safe haven” for Muslims, Srebrenica ended up overrun by Serbs who separated the men and boys, forced them to strip, killed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves in a rampage that lasted for more than a week.
Faced with the UN tribunal’s genocide indictment, Mladic in 1996 began his fugitive years in Han Pijesak, a military compound in eastern Bosnia built for former Yugoslav communist leader Josip Broz Tito and designed to withstand a nuclear attack.
With his wife, Bosa, Mladic settled down to imposed domesticity, passing the time caring for bees and goats. His 23 goats reputedly bore the names of foreign dignitaries he despised, such as Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state.
Surrounded by security guards, he occasionally ventured out of the dense pine forest to mark events such as the anniversary of the Bosnian Serb army and St Vitus Day, a religious festival marking the 1389 Serb defeat by the Turks at Kosovo.
When in the late 1990s his trail grew too hot in Bosnia, Mladic moved with family into a suburban villa in the Serbian capital, Belgrade.
When Milosevic was removed from power in October 2000, and Yugoslavia’s new pro-democracy authorities signalled they might hand Mladic over to the tribunal, newspapers reported that he had left Belgrade for Bosnia.
Mladic countered those rumours and others that said he was terminally ill in Belgrade. Before going underground in 2002, he was repeatedly seen in public, sometimes with his guards and sometimes alone, driving on the streets of the capital.
He completely disappeared from public view in 2008 and was finally arrested in May 2011 in a village near Belgrade, where he was hiding in a relative’s modest house.
