"Former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic seems intent on making a mockery of his trial before the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal." .... really? He seems to me like a guy who's brain damaged after having a series of strokes.

This isn't "an insight into the mindset of a man accused of genocide and multiple war crimes." This is just a guy who's mind is shot. The trial is a circus because the defendant can't remember what happened five minutes ago because his brain doesn't work right any more. He doesn't have the mental capacity to follow the trial testimony, let alone to defend himself -- and frankly I wouldn't trust anybody else to defend him either.

Mladic's brain was severely damaged by a few severe apoplectic attacks he suffered during the last decade, and we shouldn't be a psychiatric expert to see what aftereffect it has on his intellectual abilities. I find it disgusting that MD is making a mockery with a man who is seriously ill.

Listen to Mladic: he talks with serious difficulties and in a confused manner, he can't articulate his words, his thoughts are wandering, he make unnatural grimaces, his tongue is "swollen" and with poor coordination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE1cNiqDeMc&feature=youtu.be

Michael Dobbs seriously misdiagnoses the target of General Mladic's mockery, due allowance being made for insightful comments about his [Mladic's, not Dobbs'] medical condition offered here by other commentators. Mladic is not making a mockery of his trial but of the "Tribunal" that is pretending to try him. Like Dobbs, who has no coherent factual foundation for his overall claims about what happened in Srebrenica and who resorts to distractions about financing and conspiracy theories when cornered, judge Orie's trump card when he doesn't know what else to do is to turn off the accused's microphone. Just like judge May before him. Wow, what a display of "international justice" in action! I do hope Dobbs gets a taste of his own medicine and a "fair" trial like that at least once in his life.

Alphons Orie... Didn't he "find" Nasir Oric "innocent" of murdering ca 3000 Serb civilians around Srebrenica? Oric (not Orie) walked free after a US Green Beret colonel waltzed into the ICTY and -- in closed session -- told the "court" that Nasir Oric was/ is a US intelligence asset? "Findings" of a "court" are proof of nothing, corruption excepted, as we saw again and again in lynching trials in the US south...

In December 1994, on Sunday morning US TV, US Secretary of Defense William Perry was asked how the war was going in Bosnia. Perry didn't answer right off, but slowly and deliberately reached for his coffee cup, took a sip or two, and quietly said "the Serbs have won". That couldn't be allowed to stand, so Bill Clinton lent the USAF to Islamic Bosnia. Clinton had been buddies at Georgetown U with Saudi "Prince" Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, subsequently ambassador to the UK, Saudi CIA chief, sometime ally of Osama bin laden. His excellency endowed the University of Arkansas with big Saudi petrobucks etc. -- General Mladic beat the Great Alliance of "the International Community", and Republika Srpska exists. All the deaths in the Bosnia war are the direct result of the de-recognition of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia and "humanitarian intervention". Off they went into the wild blue yonder -- the Dutch AF, USAF, RAF, und die Luftwaffe -- the airforce of Islamic Bosnia. --Dobbs gets a "stipend" from the US State Department.

UNITED NATIONS — Serb authorities on Thursday arrested Ratko Mladic, Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect, just a week after the European Union definitively linked his capture to Serbia's bid to join the 27-nation bloc.

The arrest closed one of the most painful chapters of the 1990s Balkans wars, during which Mladic commanded Bosnian-Serb forces as he and Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic sought to carve out a Bosnian-Serb homeland from the former Yugoslav state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had declared independence from Yugoslavia.

It also reopened a deep wound for the United Nations. The world body's failure in 1995 to protect Muslim 'Bosniaks' in a UN-designated safe area in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica is one of its most infamous peacekeeping debacles, and came only a year after the UN failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda of some 800,000 people.

Serbia will transfer Mladic to the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands, where Karadzic is on trial following his capture in 2008, and where both are indicted for genocide and war crimes. The charges against both men refer not only to what happened at Srebrenica, but also to the events of the 44-month-long Bosnian-Serb siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, which began in April 1992 and killed more than 10,000.

"This is a historic day for international justice," UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday at an event in Paris. "This arrest marks an important step in our collective fight against impunity as well as for the work of the ICTY."

In New York, Ban's spokesman, Martin Nesirky, insisted the secretary general's thoughts were "first and foremost with the victims and their families," adding they had waited almost 16 years for Mladic to be brought to justice.

Many of those same families in 1999 asked the ICTY to prosecute the world body itself over the Srebrenica massacre after the release of a report in which the UN acknowledged moral responsibility for its failure to take action there.

The families were rebuffed when the UN said world body officials "have immunity from such legal action."

Though the UN Security Council warned in 1993 of a "slow-motion process of genocide" by Bosnian-Serb forces, it failed to reinforce Srebrenica's 400 Dutch peacekeepers, who, outnumbered and outgunned, allowed Mladic's troops and other militia to take away thousands of those seeking refuge. The Bosnian-Serb forces and their proxies then sent the women to Bosnian-government held territory, but systematically executed some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in nearby woods and fields over the next several days.

Between 800 and 1,600 Canadian personnel served in the Balkans from 1992-1995. Now-retired Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie was the first Sector Sarajevo commander.

"Mladic was a bully, not with his troops, but certainly in negotiations," MacKenzie recalled in an interview. "He had been promoted from colonel to lieutenant-general overnight to take command — I think it went to his head. And he threatened to send me and my troops home in body bags if the UN took any aggressive action.

"There's no excuse for Mladic. He knew better. He was trained in Russia, he was a proven officer. For him to do anything that was illegal is unacceptable. I'm pleased he's been captured, I'm pleased for Serbia."

Serb President Boris Tadic told a news conference in Belgrade that Mladic, 69, was using the name Milorad Komadic in the small Serb farming village of Lazarevo, 82 kilometres north of the Serb capital, when members of the Serb secret service tracked him down.

Tadic described the arrest as "good for Serbia," and said it would open the doors for his country to start talks to join the EU, which has long pressured the landlocked Balkan country to arrest the fugitive, who lived openly in Serbia for many years before going into hiding.

"I think today we finished a difficult period in our recent history," Tadic said. "We clear our name and the name of all Serbs, wherever they are."

But the timing of the arrest immediately raised a suspicion that Serb authorities had known all along where Mladic — a national hero to some — was living.

Tadic refused to give details of how the authorities located Mladic. The arrest came just a week after European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso issued an effective ultimatum to Serbia over its bid to win "candidate status" on the way to becoming a full EU member.

"We need results before summer," said Barroso.

Tadic was able to announce Mladic's arrest on the very day that Catherine Ashton, the EU's foreign policy chief, was due to arrive in Serbia.

News of the arrest led to the Serbian dinar jumping as much as 1.3 per cent on optimism the country will start EU membership talks. But it remained to be seen how the arrest would be received by the Serb public, which has long been wary of Western demands for trials of Serbs accused in the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, which was created in the wake of First World War.

Though Mladic had long let it be known that he would rather kill himself than face arrest, Serb media reported that he did not attempt to use either of two pistols he had within reach when police showed up.

The reports said police responded to a tip that a man known as Komadic resembled Mladic and carried Mladic's documents. They cited police as saying he was "very co-operative" and did not resist arrest.

Witnesses told Serb news reporters that Mladic had made little attempt to disguise himself. He did not have a beard, but appeared much older than when he was last seen in public in 2006.

Former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, a nationalist who himself ended up in The Hague accused of war crimes following Serbia's crackdown in Kosovo, was key to protecting Mladic in the early years following the military man's ICTY indictment.

Mladic was famously photographed attending an international soccer match in Belgrade in 2000.

For his part, Milosevic conducted his own defence before the ICTY, but died in 2006 before a verdict was reached.

Thankyou

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I see what you are saying. Since most people who are savvy in foreign policy and war have stated that this war can't be won by military means alone, but diplomacy and the political process are necessary to achieve the goals, we are still only taking the advice of the military as to how to go forward with the war and virtually ignoring the most important part, diplomacy. Meanwhile, the terrorists multiply and as soon as we draw down the troops, the terrorists and insurgents will come back...

"Is rio orange war always forfait b and you inevitable ?"
MaximB