In my last post, I talked about the "explicability of evil." Let me explain what I mean by that phrase. We should all be able to agree that the massacre of thousands of unarmed prisoners at Srebrenica in July 1995 was an evil act for which there can be no possible justification. But that does not mean that it cannot be explained -- both as an act of state policy on the part of the Bosnian Serb leadership and as a rational decision on the part of Ratko Mladic, the man who ultimately determined the fate of the people of Srebrenica.

The Srebrenica massacre belongs to a special category of war crimes so monstrous that it defies the imagination of decent people. It has been described as "genocide" by the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Whatever you want to call it, there is no denying that it was the most heinous crime of the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart between 1991 and 1995, the worst massacre to occur on European soil since the end of World War II. This is why I have paid so much attention to the Srebrenica events in this blog, as a particularly horrifying example of the evil that human beings still inflict on each other.

In the case of former United Nations "safe area," the evil was compounded by the fact that it occurred a short plane ride away from the great European capitals, at the end of the 20^th century, on the continent that created the slogan "Never Again."

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My last posting, "In Defense of the Serbs," has prompted a protest letter to Foreign Policy from Hamdija Custovic, Vice President of the Congress of North American Bosniaks. The letter is too long to reproduce in full here, but I will summarize its contents in the spirit of free and open discussion. You can read the letter in full at his  organization's website.

Custovic accuses me of "appeasing the Serbs" who have been critical of my coverage of the Ratko Mladic trial by seeking to "spread the blame" for the Serbian "aggression and genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina." He compares Milosevic's project for a "Greater Serbian state" to Hitler's attempts to "consolidate all Germans into a single state." According to Custovic, the Serbian "war of aggression finally prompted a NATO intervention in the fall of 1995 in Bosnia and again four years later in Kosovo." He fears that we are now witnessing a revival of the "same nationalist rhetoric" that caused the Bosnia war in the first place, as evidenced by the election of Tomislav Nikolic to the presidency of Serbia.

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Ratko Mladic was an archival packrat, documenting his own life meticulously through diaries, videos, and photographs. Many of these records are now in the hands of Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, to be used in his genocide trial, which adjourned today until August 21. The materials provide unique insights into not just Mladic: the war criminal, but Mladic: the family man -- a loving husband, doting granddad, and grieving father. 

At the top of this post, you will find a photograph of Mladic with his beloved daughter, Ana, taken from a video recorded in October 1993, at the height of the war in Bosnia. A medical student, Ana killed herself with her father's pistol five months later on March 23, 1994. The following two photographs show Mladic weeping over her coffin at the funeral in Belgrade, and being consoled by his wife, Bosiljka. I have described the Ana suicide, and the devastating impact that it had on Mladic, in a previous post.

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After six weeks of procedural delays and arcane legal wrangling, the trial of Ratko Mladic finally resumed today with a harrowing reminder of why it is so important: the voice of a victim.

When the Bosnia war began in March 1992, Elvedin Pasic (photographed giving his testimony above) was fourteen years old. Although he lived in a Muslim village, he went to school with Serbs and Croats. They played soccer and basketball together, celebrated each other's holidays, watched the same movies, and hung out with the same girls. Then, almost overnight, the horror began.

Shells began landing in Pasic's village on the second day of the Muslim festival of Bajram, a holiday marking the end of the month of fasting. For the next five months, his family was chased around Bosnia by Serb forces. Now 34, Elvedin choked up repeatedly as he described how his father, uncle, and 150 other friends and neighbors were killed in retaliation for the death of a Serb soldier.

It was easy to understand why prosecutors chose Pasic to speak on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the three and a half-year Bosnia war. He delivered his testimony in fluent English learned as a refugee in the United States. His detailed recounting of atrocities seen through the eyes of an innocent teenager made him a particularly convincing witness.

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Here in the United States, we have been riveted all day on the Supreme Court health care ruling. But another judicial ruling, across the Atlantic Ocean, has significant implications for international law on genocide, which has been the subject of heated debate. It is also likely to affect the trial of former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic, whose "double genocide" trial is now due to resume on July 9.

The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today ruled that the vicious spasm of ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats that accompanied the beginning of the Bosnia war in 1992 did not rise to the level of genocide. They made this ruling in response to a motion for acquittal by former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. But they also found that genocide had occurred in Srebrenica in July 1995, when around 7,000 Muslim men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serb troops.

The ruling will make little practical difference to Karadzic, who also stands accused of numerous "crimes against humanity" and violations of the "laws and customs of war" between 1992 and 1995. But it does focus attention on the charged question of how to define genocide, a subject that I have attempted to deal with in previous posts here and there.

Controversy over proper use of the G-word dates back to the 1948 United Nations convention on genocide, which emphasized the subjective motivations of the perpetrators. Genocide is defined as mass killing or other acts with "the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group." In other words, it is not enough to murder a large number of people. In order to be convicted of genocide, you must also be shown to have "genocidal intent."

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Visiting the village of Lazarevo, where Ratko Mladic was finally captured in May 2011, I received a vivid reminder of the nature of war in the former Yugoslavia. The present-day community owes its very existence to the practice of ethnic cleansing, which became such a noxious part of the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

I took the above photograph in the graveyard of Lazarevo, founded more than two centuries ago by Swabian Germans who emigrated to the rich Danubian plain of Vojvodina under the Habsburg empire. On the right, you can see the graves of the original German inhabitants, in an untended, overgrown part of the cemetery. On the left, you can see the well-cared for graves of Bosnian Serbs, who were resettled here after World War II.

The Germans were expelled from what was then Lazarfeld by the Communist regime of Marshal Tito in 1945 as collective punishment for their alleged cooperation with the Nazi occupiers of Serbia. Their land, and houses, went to the families of communist partisans from Bosnia, including several relatives of Ratko Mladic. The newcomers arrived from the south on the so-called  "trains without a timetable" that were organized to facilitate the great migration.

According to the 2002 census, only one German is left in Lazarevo, whose population of 3,308 is 95 percent Serb.  Prior to World War II, the village was almost exclusively German.

The story of Lazarfeld/Lazarevo illustrates a couple of unpleasant truths about warfare, Balkan style.

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As Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell might say, losing track of your legal documents on one occasion can be considered a misfortune. Repeating the same mistake a second time is beginning to look very much like carelessness.

The hapless prosecution team in the trial of Ratko Mladic have now conceded that they have failed a second time to make available thousands of documents to the defense that they are required to release under the disclosure rules of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. That left the judges no alternative but to suspend the trial indefinitely while they sort out the bureaucratic mess.

It now seems virtually certain that the long-awaited Mladic trial, which opened on May 16 in the Hague with a two-day presentation by the prosecution, will not resume until after the court's annual recess over the summer. The trial was originally scheduled to resume on May 29, but the date was pushed back until June 25 after the prosecution first acknowledged disclosure problems.

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The photograph above shows me outside Ratko Mladic's house in Bozanovici. Standing there made me realize the distance that Mladic traveled to become a general in the Yugoslav army and arguably the most powerful Serb in the world. But how exactly did he leave the village, while his cousins got left behind?

Undoubtedly, Mladic proved to be a very capable military officer, with a peasant-like cunning that noticed everything that was happening around him. But key to his promotion through the ranks of the "Yugoslav People's Army" was his impeccable political pedigree. His father Nedo was a member of Tito's communist partisans, who was killed in a raid on the home village of the Croatian quisling dictator, Ante Pavelic.

The first page of Mladic's official military biography, which you can see here, includes the annotation, "Father killed in NOR," an acronym for "People's Liberation War." Implicit in the formula is that Nedo was on the right side. 

Being on the "right" side opened a lot of doors in Tito's Yugoslavia.

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Izudin Alic was eight years old when he met Ratko Mladic outside the headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping battalion in Srebrenica.  Staging an elaborate propaganda show for the television cameras, the 53-year-old Bosnian Serb commander picked out a cherubic-looking boy from the crowd, and patted him twice on the cheek.  Then he asked his age.

"Twelve," lied Izudin in a squeaky voice, trying to appear more grown up than he actually was. 

I met Izudin during my recent trip to Srebrenica.  He is now 25, and only has hazy memories of that terrible day, seventeen years ago, when Bosnian Serb forces embarked on their killing spree against men and boys who had taken refuge in the United Nations "safe area."  Izudin's father, Sahzet, was among some 8,000 Muslim refugees who were hunted down and  killed by Mladic's men. 

Izudin returned to his native village of Prohici, just outside Srebrenica, soon after the end of the war along with surviving members of his family, including his mother.  He watched the opening of the Mladic trial in The Hague on television, trying to make sense of the moment when he was briefly thrust into the media spotlight.  He recalls rushing to the front of the crowd of refugees when Bosnian Serb soldiers began distributing candy and chocolates for the benefit of the television cameras.

"I was there when the children were taking the candy," he recalled.  "Like the other children, I took some candy from the soldiers and ate it.  Had I known about the crimes that were being committed, I would never have accepted the candy."

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I just completed a weeklong trip to Bosnia, including a day in Srebrenica and a fascinating visit to the birthplace of Ratko Mladic in the inhospitable mountains south of Sarajevo. I am planning a series of blog posts describing my impressions, but let me begin by introducing you to Emir Suljagic, one of the survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, who has just launched an American-style political campaign to reelect the only Muslim mayor in Republika Srpska.

The author of one of the best books on the Bosnia war, Postcards from the Grave, Suljagic worked as an interpreter for the United Nations in the "safe area" of Srebrenica when it fell to the Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. At the time, he was just 20 years old. He would almost certainly have been killed along with 8,000 or so other Muslim men and boys -- had he not been provided safe passage out of the enclave with other U.N. employees.

One of the reasons I liked Suljagic's book, apart from the fact that it was very well-written, was its tone of restraint and balance. In the case of Srebrenica, he acknowledges that crimes were also committed by Bosniak government forces, although nothing to compare with the mass executions of Muslim prisoners by Mladic's men. These days, however, Suljagic is not at all restrained. Alarmed by the prospect that Serb nationalists might gain political control over the Srebrenica municipality in elections scheduled for October, he is spoiling for a fight.

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The trial began -- and then it stopped because of so-called "disclosure" problems. What's up with that?

Prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today gave their first detailed explanation for the bungled opening of the Ratko Mladic trial. In a 42-page filing to the court, they blamed the fiasco on a computer "operator error" that had led to the non-disclosure of around 5,000 documents, or just over 3 percent of the disclosable trial record. They added that the omissions were largely "technical" in nature, and should not require a lengthy trial delay. 

The trial, which began on May 16 with a summary of the prosecution case against the former Bosnian Serb military commander, was due to resume on May 29 with the calling of witnesses. But Judge Alphons Orie ordered an indefinite delay while he investigated "significant errors" by the prosecution in the disclosure process. Lawyers for Mladic have called for a six-month postponement of the trial, alleging "an unprecedented disclosure failure whose scope is without parallel in the history of the Tribunal."

For those interested in the details, I have posted the latest prosecution filing here, along with the defense filing here, and e-mail correspondence between the prosecutor and defense here.

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Nearly seventeen years after he was first indicted, former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic went on trial today for crimes against humanity that culminated in Europe's worst massacre since World War II in July 1995.

In a courtroom packed with relatives of victims of the three-and-a half year Bosnia war, prosecutor Dermot Groome read out a catalog of crimes allegedly committed by Mladic's men, ranging from the taking of hostages and shelling of civilians to rapes and mass killing.  The 69-year old general is accused of double genocide, stemming from a massive ethnic cleansing campaign at the beginning of the war and the killing of 7,000 Muslim prisoners in Srebrenica at the end.

Dressed in a dark suit, Mladic waved and gave the thumbs-up sign to spectators in the public gallery at the start of a trial that is expected to take at least two years. He also held up a book emblazoned with the image of King Peter II of Yugoslavia, who was overthrown by the Nazis at the beginning of World War II.

"Mladic wanted to send a message to us that he, too, is some kind of king," said Munira Subasic, who lost 22 members of her extended family in the Srebrenica killings, including her husband and son. "But I am happy because he is finally in jail. God will punish him."

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One of the first witnesses in the Mladic trial, which opens in the Hague next Wednesday, will be David Harland, who was chief of United Nations civil affairs in Bosnia at the time of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. A New Zealander who now heads the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, Harland was also the principal author of the 1999 United Nations report on Srebrenica, which painted a devastating picture of bungling by the international community.

Harland has thought a lot about the political and diplomatic missteps that led to the fall of the former United Nations "safe area" and has frequently lectured about the subject. He provided me with a list of key "decision points" dating back to 1991, when different actions by the international community might have saved tens of thousands of lives.

Several of the fateful "decision points" cited by Harland relate to the chaotic final days prior to the fall of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. I have reviewed several of these missed opportunities in previous posts looking at the failure of United Nations commanders to approve requests from the beleaguered Dutch peacekeeping battalion for close air support.  Here I will go back to the early days of the conflict, which obviously represented the best chance for western governments to prevent the downward spiral into violence.

Harland comments that it is probable that "many more people would be alive today" had any of the following decisions "gone the other way."

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There is an interesting back story to Barack Obama's call today for stronger action to prevent genocide that directly relates to the subject of this blog. The president's speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum announcing new sanctions against perpetrators of mass atrocities was shaped in large part by senior aides with first-hand experience in places like Bosnia and Rwanda.

The key person here is Samantha Power, now a senior foreign policy advisor to Obama, who was a young reporter in Bosnia in July 1995 at the time of the Srebrenica massacre, seething in frustration at the failure of the international community to take effective action against the likes of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic. As the author of the Pulitzer prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, Power provided much of the intellectual heft for a growing genocide prevention movement that has sought to pressure the United States government to live up to the slogan "Never Again."

In her book, Power states that she returned from Bosnia "haunted by the murder of Srebenica's Muslim men and boys, my own failure to sound a proper early warning, and the outside world's refusal to intervene even once the men's peril had become obvious." She noted pointedly that the United States "had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred."

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