‘Butcher of Bosnia’ Mladic’s appeal verdict in June

International judges will give their verdict on June 8 on an appeal by former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic against his genocide conviction over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, a UN court said Friday.

Mladic was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 for overseeing the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys, and for war crimes and crimes against humanity in general during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

“The judgement on the appeals in the present case shall be pronounced in public in The Hague, The Netherlands, on Tuesday, 8 June,” the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement.

The court, which deals with cases left over from the now-closed UN war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia, held hearings on Mladic’s appeal in August last year.

During the hearings, the frail-looking former general raged that he had been “pushed into war” and dismissed the court as a “child of western powers”.

In a rambling speech that dug up centuries of historic grievances, Mladic said he remained a “target of the NATO alliance” and accused prosecutors in The Hague of “showering me with satanic, snaky, devilish words”.

Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mladic was convicted of orchestrating a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” to drive Muslims and Bosnians out of key areas to create a Greater Serbia as Yugoslavia tore itself apart after the fall of communism.

The two-day appeal hearing had been delayed several times after Mladic needed surgery to remove a polyp, and then because of the coronavirus pandemic.