Ratko Mladic, war criminal and former Bosnian Serb military leader, dead

Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War, has died.

Mladic died in UN custody on Thursday, his lawyer Dragan Ivetic said, without giving a cause. The former general had spent ​his last months in the hospital ward of the UN detention centre holding him in a suburb of The Hague, Ivetic added.

The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which Mladic pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy gunfire of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000 people.

The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so ‌as to hide evidence of the killings.

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.

The tribunal found that Mladic, together with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.

"I do not recognize this court," Mladic, dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia" by his opponents, said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 he shouted that it was "all lies."

Karadzic, also convicted of genocide in 2016, and Mladic topped the ICTY wanted list for years ​after Western powers ended the war. But until Milosevic was toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived securely — if discreetly — in Belgrade.

Milosevic died in detention on March 11, 2006, ⁠a few months before a verdict in his four-year tribunal ⁠trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a ‌model of ruthlessness. 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.

"For me Mladic is a symbol of all horrible crimes that happened during the war — our girls were raped, and boys killed, only because they ⁠were Muslim," said Munira Subasic, whose son and husband were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran Srebrenica.

Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, haranguing Dutch UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands.