NP: Mladić, part 2

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Diplomats who tried to end the war and journalists who covered it, including myself, had hoped that the tribunal would finally provide some answers to unresolved questions, including why Mladić chose to slaughter so many, so openly. The verdict stated that a day after Srebrenica fell, on July 12th, Bosnian Serb forces abandoned an earlier plan to house the thousands of captured Muslim men and boys in a prison camp in the town of Batković. Instead, they carried out summary executions in a half-dozen locations across eastern Bosnia. The logistics of the killings speak to their premeditation. Scores of buses were needed to move the men and boys to execution sites. Dozens of executioners, willing to shoot unarmed prisoners, needed to be recruited. Remote fields, a community center, and a farm were chosen as killing grounds. Backhoes and excavators were used to dig mass graves and fill them with corpses.

After the verdict, Carl Bildt, a European Union and U.N. peace envoy who had met with Mladić during the conflict and demanded that he protect the Srebrenica prisoners, told me that Mladić’s decision still haunted him. While prosecutors were able to get some Serb officials to testify against Mladić, the thinking of the General when he ordered the killings remains unclear.

“Why? That’s still somewhat of mystery,” Bildt told me by e-mail. “Perhaps they simply got overwhelmed by the logistics of handling thousands of prisoners,” or “anger/revenge/hatred easily took them into what for the moment might have looked like the easiest way of handling the situation.” He added, “Perhaps. But I’m still struggling.”

David Harland, a former senior United Nations diplomat in Bosnia, said that the mass executions amounted to a strategic blunder by Mladić, because their scale forced the United States and NATO to intervene against the Serbs in the conflict. “The great mystery remains why,” Harland told me. “Not why so cruel, but why so stupid?”

Hasan Nuhanović, a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre, told me that the General’s motives were unimportant to him. “I really don’t care why Mladić did that or this,” he said. “I don’t care if he had a motive. The only thing I care about is that he did it.”

Nuhanović, whose father, mother, and brother were executed after Dutch peacekeepers handed them over to Mladić’s forces, called on the international community to take its promise to protect civilians more seriously. In a series of actions in Srebrenica that became a model for how not to intervene in a conflict in the future, the U.N. declared the surrounded town a “safe area,” seized the heavy weapons that its Bosnian Muslim inhabitants had used to defend themselves, and then made scant effort to protect the enclave when Mladić’s forces overran it. The U.N. peacekeeping mission in the town abetted the killings instead of preventing them.

“I think we should try to look at things in a very simple way. It was a U.N. safe area. Full stop,” Nuhanović said. “This was supposed to be a prevention of genocide, not a continuation.”

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