War crimes prosecutors move swiftly against Mladic over Bosnian Muslim massacre

Pared down indictment for Ratko Mladic, reducing the number of charges from 15 to 11, is indication the the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia wants to expedite the trial against he former Bosnian Serb army commander.

A forensic science expert of the International Commission for Missing Persons holds a skull at the ICMP centre near Tuzla yesterday, while trying to identify remains of a victim of the Srebrenica massShow more

THE HAGUE // Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) yesterday moved quickly to start the case against Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander who was extradited to the Hague on Monday.

Mr Mladic will appear before the court tomorrow to be arraigned on charges of war crimes and genocide during the conflict in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz, yesterday acknowledged the importance of the capture of Mr Mladic, 69, to help Europe move past the deep wounds that were left by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the most violent conflict on European soil since the end of the Second World War and one that pitted mostly Christian Serbs against mostly Muslim Bosniaks.

The arrest of Mr Mladic in Serbia was helped by that country's wish to apply for EU membership, he said at a press conference. The extradition of the fugitive was one of the conditions for the talks to start. But Serbia still has to answer questions over how the former general was able to evade justice for nearly 16 years.

"We want to verify who over the past five years have been instrumental in helping Mladic to stay in hiding and we want them to be accountable," Mr Brammertz said.

Speed is imperative in the case of Mr Mladic because of his apparently precarious health as well as the looming deadline for the tribunal to finish its work. The mandate of the ICTY, set up by the UN Security Council in 1993, ends in 2014. But that may be extended to allow the cases against Mr Mladic and his former political boss, Radovan Karadzic, to be completed.

"It would have been a grave injustice if we had to close our door without having him put on trial here," said Nerma Jelacic, spokesperson for the tribunal and a Bosnian who fled the violence in the 1990s. The conflict between 1992 and 1995 displaced two million people and more than 100,000 lost their lives.

The court is paying special attention to the prisoner's health, which his lawyers have said is failing. The most high-profile accused to stand trial in The Hague, the former Yugoslav and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, died in his cell of a heart attack in 2006 before the case was completed.

Mr Brammertz yesterday presented a pared down indictment for Mr Mladic, reducing the number of charges from 15 to 11, another indication the court wants to expedite the trial. The accusations include one of genocide for the killing of more than 8,000 Muslims in the UN-protected safe haven of Srebrenica in 1995. The former general also stands accused in the death of 10,000 civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and of other crimes during the conflict.

Even as the prosecutor was outlining the charges against Mr Mladic, the case against him was being cemented down the hall in three courtrooms where four other Bosnian Serb defendants are standing trial.

Most poignantly, in the proceedings against Mr Karadzic yesterday, the general was placed at a meeting in the early 1990s in which the Serb leadership decided on measures against the Bosnian Muslims to ensure that "either the whole of Bosnia or the Serbian parts will remain in Yugoslavia".

Bosnian Serbs are not the only ones to stand trial even though they form the majority of the cases. In total, the tribunal has issued 161 indictments to Serbs, Croats and Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. "We did not indict people on the basis of their nationalities. We indicted them on the basis of the crimes they committed," Ms Jelacic said. Of the 161, just one is still a fugitive, Goran Hadzic, a Serb politician from Croatia who was seen moving freely in Serbia in 2004.

The ICTY has helped the countries of the former Yugoslavia strengthen their own judiciaries to deal with further war-crimes cases, beyond the 2014 deadline for the tribunal.

Ms Jelacic said that the tribunal is helping the countries in the Balkans to move on. "Through doing its job, it is having an impact on the way people's ability to deal with the past, to accept the facts and to discover the scale of the atrocities that were committed in the 1990s and finding those responsible," she said.

But the process was not nearly over, she warned. "There is a huge road to travel from putting a few people on trial and reconciliation. There is a lot more to that."