“One soldier approached a woman in the middle of a crowd,” he said. “Her child was crying. The soldier asked why the child was crying and she explained that he was hungry. The soldier made a comment like, ‘He won’t be hungry anymore.’ He slit the child’s throat in front of everybody.”
It’s a bugger when political imperative is the driving force behind capturing them and putting them on trial though…I’d rather this had happened before it became necessary in order to protect Serbia’s chances of entering the EU.
I heard that stated on NPR this morning. I was unaware of the issue. So what gives? He was being protected for the last 16 years, and Serbia essentially got an ultimatum that read, “Make with the Butcher of Srebrenica, or no EU for you”?
The part that gets me is that they didn’t give him up when it mattered most. Instead he was protected. Now all the justice-craving world gets is a haggard old man, paralyzed in one arm because of multiple strokes. A man that cannot be moved to hear the preliminary extradition trial in Belgrade, much less the actual trial in the Netherlands.
It’s a hollow victory knowing that his life will most likely end by natural means well before the trial ends. Just like with Milosevic.
The two cases are linked… one of the reasons Serbia was able to put off handing Mladic over was the USA’s failure to find Osama Bin Laden.
Serbia were able to say “how dare the West criticise us for not finding our bad guys, when you can’t even find the world’s Public Enemy #1”.
Now that Bin Laden’s done for Serbia were under more pressure… let’s not pretend that the authorities didn’t know exactly where Mladic has been all this time.
Ratko Mladic was caught and now faces justice in The Hague. So the man is looking at say a 5 year long drawn out media circus were the Western World is criticized for passing judgement on it’s moral high tower. Countless witnesses will have to relive the worst days of their lives in front of a man who’ll argue he was just doing his job. Justice will be metered out with a life sentence, but he’s 69 years old for god sakes, so can’t put him in a real prison were he might die! He’ll get out a year or two later to be placed in a hostpital where he’ll spend the rest of his comfortable retirement enjoying Ricki Lake reruns between sponge baths.
We should have just put one in his fucking eye and been done with it. :mad: