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  1. #1
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    Ratko Mladic Arrested in Serbia

    Ratko Mladic arrested, Serbian president confirms

    Former Bosnian Serb commander wanted for war crimes, including Srebrenica massacre, to be extradited to UN tribunal



    • Ratko Mladic (left), pictured with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in 1994, has been arrested in Serbia. Photograph: Reuters



      Police in Serbia have arrested Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader wanted by the United Nations for war crimes committed during the Bosnian war, including the Srebrenica massacre.


      The detention of Mladic – who had let it be known that he would rather kill himself than be arrested – was confirmed by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.


      "On behalf of the Republic of Serbia I can announce the arrest of Ratko Mladic," Tadic told reporters.


      Mladic, who was arrested in Serbia, would be extradited to the United Nations war crimes tribunal, Tadic said. He did not specify when, but said "an extradition process is under way".


      "We ended a difficult period of our history and removed the stain from the face of the members of our nation wherever they live," Tadic said.
      Mladic has already been indicted by the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) over allegations of genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian war.


      Mladic, now 68, is wanted as the commander of the 44-month-long siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, which killed more than 10,000 people, and for the massacre in July 1995 of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.


      "Today we closed one chapter of our recent history that will help us one step closer to reconciliation in the region," Tadic said.
      The president said he believed the arrest would facilitate his country's entry into the European Union. Mladic's extradition to Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague has been a condition of Serbia's bid to join the EU.


      "I believe that the doors for Serbia to join the EU are open," Tadic said.
      Serbia had been under intense pressure over Mladic. The chief UN war crimes prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, complained this month that authorities were not doing enough to capture him.


      Brammertz was scheduled to report in June to the UN security council about Serbian efforts to detain Mladic and other war crimes fugitives.


      The European Union foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, welcomed the arrest and said Mladic should be sent to the tribunal without delay.
      "This is an important step forward for Serbia and for international justice," Ashton said in a statement.


      "We expect Ratko Mladic to be transferred to the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia without delay. Full co-operation with the ICTY remains essential on Serbia's path towards EU membership."
      An official from the Serbian interior ministry said Mladic was arrested after authorities received an anonymous tip. His identity was confirmed by DNA tests, the official said.


      US and Serbian authorities had offered rewards of up to $19m (£11m) for information leading to Mladic's arrest.


      According to Croatia's Zagreb newspaper Jutarnji List, Mladic was living under the pseudonym of Milorad Komadic. The paper reported that the secret operation to arrest him came after a tipoff that Komadic "possessed some identification marks of Ratko Mladic and was physically very similar to him".


      Mladic had lived openly in Belgrade for a number of years but dropped out of sight after 2000. Before then there had been credible reports of Mladic dining in fashionable restaurants and attending football matches.

      Radovan Karadzic, the wartime political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was arrested in 2008. Recent years have seen the surrender of a number of Mladic's former allies to the war crimes court as Belgrade has come under increasing pressure to co-operate with it. Those detained have included Radivoje Miletic and Milan Gvero, both accused of involvement in so-called ethnic cleansing.


      The British foreign secretary, William Hague, congratulated the Serbian government for the arrest, which he called a "historic moment".
      "Ratko Mladic stands accused of terrible crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina and it is right that he will now be brought to face international justice. Today our thoughts are with the relatives of those killed during the siege of Sarajevo and genocide in Srebrenica," Hague said.
      "Today should mark the beginning of a new chapter for the countries of the western Balkans."


      ---


      Mladic was indicted by a UN war crimes tribunal on fifteen charges for his role in the Balkan wars of the 1990s
      These are the counts:
      Count 1: genocide
      Count 2: complicity in genocide
      Count 3: Persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds
      Count 4: Extermination
      Count 5: Murder
      Count 6: Murder
      Count 7: Deportation
      Count 8: Inhumane acts (forcible transfer)
      Count 9: unlawfully inflicting terror upon civilians
      Count 10: murder
      Count 11: murder
      Count 12: cruel treatment
      Count 13: inhumane acts
      Count 14: attacks on civilians
      Count 15: taking of hostages


      Ratko Mladic arrested, Serbian president confirms | World news | guardian.co.uk
      Ratko Mladic arrest - live updates | News | guardian.co.uk


    The Above Post May Contain Strong Language, Flashing Lights, or Violent Scenes.

  2. #2
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    The UN genocide courts have been heavily biased, they only prosecute one side in a conflict, so they have no credibility. Hell, they just supported the rape and murder of thousands of people in Ivory Coast along with France a little over a month ago.

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    Must be the year of nailing fugitives. How much longer has Lord Lucan got?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs
    The UN genocide courts have been heavily biased, they only prosecute one side in a conflict, so they have no credibility. Hell, they just supported the rape and murder of thousands of people in Ivory Coast along with France a little over a month ago.
    "gribbs" is on his soapbox "gribbs" is on hsis soapbox, nah nah na nahhhhhhh!

    Stick the topic gribbs you wankerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

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    Mladic doesn't really have a defence as he was often in front of the media spotlight at the time. Cause and effect of the Bosnain conflict are debatable, but someone must be held accountable for Sarajevo at least. I'm glad they caught him, it's unfortunate that they didn't do it sooner, I can only assume that at 68 his power and wealth have dimished to the point where it was expedient to get rid of him.
    Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!"

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    Quote Originally Posted by harrybarracuda
    Must be the year of nailing fugitives. How much longer has Lord Lucan got?
    Yes "arry" good point, it's taken em long enough to arrest him.

    Lord Lucan of course is a totally different "kettle of fish", aristocracy all stick together, don't take my word for it just ask "noodless"! he's an authority on High Society!

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    Sticking to the topic there Rodney...?

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs View Post
    The UN genocide courts have been heavily biased, they only prosecute one side in a conflict, so they have no credibility. Hell, they just supported the rape and murder of thousands of people in Ivory Coast along with France a little over a month ago.
    Who is this idiot?

  9. #9
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    Who knows who's right and wrong , both sides in that conflict were bad, but the saying -
    the victors will always be the judges and the vanquished the accused -
    holds true , how about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton being put in the dock for bombing civilians in Serbia ?

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    Why did they arrest him ? they should have shoot him instead,

    far worse than 10,000 Bin Laden

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    Mladic wasn't backed by the CIA..?

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    Good news they have caught up with him.

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    After 16 years of fruitless searching the Serb Authiorities just as they are looking for acceptance into the EEC happen to stumble upon him...........how lucky was that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by blue View Post
    Who knows who's right and wrong , both sides in that conflict were bad, but the saying -
    the victors will always be the judges and the vanquished the accused -
    holds true , how about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton being put in the dock for bombing civilians in Serbia ?
    In another life i did two tours of Bosnia in 95 an 97 and i served again with the UN in Kosovo in 99. Believe me when it came to war crimes The Serbs were way out front. The Bosnian Muslims and especially The Croats were not innocent but they were nothing compared to the Chetniks when it came to base level barbarity against civilians.

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    The man is a grub shooting is too good for him.

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    Quote Originally Posted by thegent View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs View Post
    The UN genocide courts have been heavily biased, they only prosecute one side in a conflict, so they have no credibility. Hell, they just supported the rape and murder of thousands of people in Ivory Coast along with France a little over a month ago.
    Who is this idiot?
    You're either retarded or severly brainwashed. The United Nations is not some benign organization with that treats all people fairly. They have their own motivations and biases. You can see what they've just done in the Ivory Coast where they and France decided it was their right to decide who was the winner of the presidental election, and meddle in the affairs of a soverign country. It is no surprise the guy who they claim won the election is their and France puppet, who wants to rape and pillage the resources of the country and make them indebted to the IMF. For fucks sake they've become so arrogant they didn't even hide their motives anymore, the leader they put in power in the Ivory Coast has a French wife who happens to be a close friend of the French president, and her son from her first job got an important job in the Ivory Coast coco industry, the largest in the world.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Scottish Gary View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by blue View Post
    Who knows who's right and wrong , both sides in that conflict were bad, but the saying -
    the victors will always be the judges and the vanquished the accused -
    holds true , how about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton being put in the dock for bombing civilians in Serbia ?
    In another life i did two tours of Bosnia in 95 an 97 and i served again with the UN in Kosovo in 99. Believe me when it came to war crimes The Serbs were way out front. The Bosnian Muslims and especially The Croats were not innocent but they were nothing compared to the Chetniks when it came to base level barbarity against civilians.
    It is really difficult to consider on group, even so called civilians "innocent' when it is an ethnic war. One group wants to kill or chase off the other group, they aren't acting as individuals, or judging the other group as invidividuals, but as a particular ethnic group.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs
    Who is this idiot?
    You mean to tell us you haven't met "gribbs" yet?

    Oh you're in for a real treat, can't wait to read what comes next!

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Bold Rodney View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs
    Who is this idiot?
    You mean to tell us you haven't met "gribbs" yet?

    Oh you're in for a real treat, can't wait to read what comes next!
    Hey look, its every ones favorite shabbos goy.....

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    Quote Originally Posted by Butterfly
    Why did they arrest him ? they should have shoot him instead,
    English you prick "pupa" Englsihhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

    Quote Originally Posted by Neo
    Mladic wasn't backed by the CIA..?
    He wasn't but now you've posted it he will have been, no doubt the CIA conspiracy nutters will pick up on this!

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs
    Hey look, its every ones favorite shabbos goy.....
    Now, now "gwibbs" my little muzzie headcase you're on your soapbox without your medication and you know that's not good for you!

    p.s. Stop banging on about the coons on the Ivory Coast, nobody's listening to you and they don't give a FF "gwibbs"!

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by The Bold Rodney View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs
    Hey look, its every ones favorite shabbos goy.....
    Now, now "gwibbs" my little muzzie headcase you're on your soapbox without your medication and you know that's not good for you!

    p.s. Stop banging on about the coons on the Ivory Coast, nobody's listening to you and they don't give a FF "gwibbs"!

    He's a shabbo shabbo shabbo-goy

    He goes by the name of Rodney Rodney Rodney-Boy

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    Quote Originally Posted by Mr Gribbs View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by Scottish Gary View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by blue View Post
    Who knows who's right and wrong , both sides in that conflict were bad, but the saying -
    the victors will always be the judges and the vanquished the accused -
    holds true , how about Tony Blair and Bill Clinton being put in the dock for bombing civilians in Serbia ?
    In another life i did two tours of Bosnia in 95 an 97 and i served again with the UN in Kosovo in 99. Believe me when it came to war crimes The Serbs were way out front. The Bosnian Muslims and especially The Croats were not innocent but they were nothing compared to the Chetniks when it came to base level barbarity against civilians.
    It is really difficult to consider on group, even so called civilians "innocent' when it is an ethnic war. One group wants to kill or chase off the other group, they aren't acting as individuals, or judging the other group as invidividuals, but as a particular ethnic group.
    In Bosnia i had to deal with all three ethnic groups. The Serbs were absolutely dominant,ruthless and fanatical. The Serb-Croat conflict was more like a conventional war but the Serbs war against the Bosnian Muslims was simple ethnic cleansing. When it came to killing the Serbs made no distinction between military and civilians. Kids and pensioners were seen as legitimate targets by the government backed death squads.

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    The man is sick and now will have a nice room in a nice prison with all necessary medical aid.

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    Ratko Mladic's trial opens with a cut-throat gesture
    Julian Borger
    16 May 2012

    The ex-Bosnian Serb commander faced the ghosts of Srebrenica and Sarajevo on the first day of his war crimes trial


    Former Bosnian Serb military commander General Ratko Mladic at the start of his trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

    Photograph: Rex Features

    The electric blinds rose like a curtain on a West End production and there stood the protagonist: the former general charged with crimes against humanity that almost defy the imagination, reduced to a hollow-looking old man in a blue-grey suit and matching tie.

    Ratko Mladic's military cap and angry heckling – on combative display just after his arrest last year – had gone, on advice from his lawyers, and the erstwhile Bosnian Serb commander had shrunk to the point that he was barely recognisable from his bluff, ruddy-faced wartime prime.

    But the bile was still there, impossible to disguise or suppress.

    He greeted the bereaved families and survivors in the public gallery on the other side of the bulletproof glass with a sarcastic slow handclap and thumbs up, deriding their victory over him as if it were a temporary setback, soon to be reversed.

    And when the furious mother of one of the 8,000 men and boys killed in 1995 in Srebrenica could restrain herself no more and made a dismissive hand signal at him, he drew a single finger across his throat.

    A chill went through the old Dutch insurance building where the Hague war crimes tribunal does its business. Even a seemingly empty gesture from a bitter old man has the power to shock when that man is facing 11 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including two counts of genocide.

    Mladic's lawyer, Branko Lukic, made light of the incident, as you might shrug off the growling of an old attack dog that it had never been entirely possible to tame.

    "We visited him before the trial and tried to persuade him to be quiet, not to say anything at all," Lukic said. "He told me he made that sign at a woman in the gallery who provoked him by showing him the middle finger. He is like that. He does the same to me."

    The Dutch presiding judge, Alphons Orie, called a toilet break and afterwards told Mladic to ignore the gallery and focus on the trial.

    He warned the angry women in the gallery to avoid "inappropriate interactions in the future" or he would lower the curtain once more on the oval goldfish bowl of a courtroom and continue in camera.

    Over the following four hours, the prosecution at the Hague court, known formally as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, outlined the case against Mladic.

    One of the prosecutors, Dermot Groome, took the tribunal through reams of material demonstrating that, as the head of the Bosnian Serb general staff during the 1992-95 war, Mladic had firm control over the regular army and irregular paramilitaries who carried out mass killings across Bosnia.

    "The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes," Groome said.

    The statement was a litany of mass murder: 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war, mostly ethnic Muslims and Croats, tens of thousands of them civilians; 10,000 died in the 44-month siege of Sarajevo; 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered in the storming of the Srebrenica enclave in 1995.

    Groome interspersed the statistics with reminders of the individual murders hidden within them, each a tragedy leaving whole families with unbearable pain that they will never overcome. He described the death of Nermin Divovic, a seven-year-old who went out to fetch firewood with his mother and sister in Sarajevo in the freezing winter of November 1994.

    "A Serb sniper aligned his rifle with Nermin's mother and the bullet passed through her abdomen and into his head," Groome said. The boy's mother, Dzenana Sokolovic, lay wounded on the street, not immediately aware that her son was dead. She thought he was simply obeying her instructions to drop to the ground when under fire.

    Groome also told the story of Dino Salihovic, a 16-year-old from Srebrenica, shot dead on video by a Serb paramilitary group calling itself the Scorpions.

    "He was taunted by his murderers that he would die a virgin," Groome said, displaying only a still from the sickening and notorious video.

    "You watch him walk forward with his hands tied behind his back and see bullets tear through his back."

    It is the prosecution's contention that all the killing was part of an "overarching" plan, in the form of six war aims drawn up by Mladic, a former Yugoslav army officer who was recruited by the Bosnian Serb nationalists at the start of the war.

    The plan involved carving out an expansive Serb homeland from the ethnic patchwork of prewar Bosnia, and "ethnically cleansing" the Muslim and Croat communities, creating a corridor linking its eastern and western halves and gaining access to the sea.

    In this endeavour, Mladic was one of a triumvirate of murderous Serb nationalists.

    Slobodan Milosevic was the cool mastermind for whom Bosnia was just part of a regional scheme for a Greater Serbia. The former Yugoslav president was handed over to The Hague in 2001 by the Serbian government that ousted him, but died of a heart attack in his cell here in 2006 while his trial was still under way.

    Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, was the dandy of the trio, a psychiatrist with a bouffant hairdo who fancied himself a poet. He was seized in Belgrade, where he had been posing as a new age healer under an assumed name. Karadzic is currently midway through his own trial and he and Mladic have been reunited as cellmates here.

    Mladic was the hot-headed bulldozer of the three. His inability to imagine that he might end up where he is today meant that he left plenty of hostages to fortune in his many explicit military directives ordering the ethnic cleansing of the Republika Srpska, and his frequent boasts designed to intimidate the foreigners, officials and journalists that he came across.

    In 1992, he told one UN envoy that he would make Sarajevo "shake" if even one of his soldiers were injured, saying: "I will retaliate against the town … Sarajevo will shake, more shells will fall in one second than in the entire war so far."

    Driving with a Canadian Serb in August 1994, he laughed and was recorded on video as saying: "Whenever I go by Sarajevo, I kill someone. We kick the hell out of the Turks [a reference to Bosnian Muslims]. Who gives a fuck about them?"

    Some of his lieutenants said his behaviour became increasingly erratic after the suicide of his daughter Ana, who used his army revolver to shoot herself in the head in March 1994, possibly after reading reports of atrocities committed by her father's army.

    During his 16 years on the run, he became steadily more isolated and impoverished. He was finally arrested by Serbian security forces last year, hiding in a cousin's cottage in a village not far from Belgrade.

    One of the Srebrenica survivors in the Hague gallery, Zumra Sehomerovic, said Mladic's trial had been a long time coming, but that it was never too late for justice. "I am proud when I see Mladic finally behind that glass, in front of the court. It has come after 16 years, but there is no statute of limitations on the crimes he committed."

    Sehomerovic's husband and three other family members were killed at Srebrenica and she said she saw the general up close when he appeared at the scene to "reassure" the terrified captives.

    "When I look at him today, I see the man I saw then in 1995. I was standing a metre from him," she recalled.

    "There he was with his sleeves rolled up, and he was telling us everything would be OK. He was giving chocolate to the children and said he said he just needed to keep some of the men for a prisoner exchange, but that everybody would be together again soon. And then he killed them all."

    guardian.co.uk

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