The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced Bosnian Serb army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment for genocide and crimes against humanity in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The judgment was appropriate.
Mr. Mladic was convicted, 22 years after the end of the war, for having ordered the killing of an estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia and, among many other crimes, for having commanded the shelling of the country’s capital, Sarajevo, for months, inflicting many civilian as well as combatant casualties. His forces numbered at least 150,000, ringed around the city, firing into it. The court, located in The Hague, Netherlands, found him guilty on 10 of 11 charges after a long trial.
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The civilian leader of the Serbs in the Bosnia-Herzegovina war, Radovan Karadzic, received a 40-year sentence from the same court last year. Given his age, now 72, that amounts to a life sentence as well.
The war was brought to an end by negotiations conducted by American diplomat Richard Holbrooke in an agreement called the Dayton Accords, based on the talks having been held in an Air Force base near Dayton. The parties involved included Alija Izetbegovic on the Muslim side, Slobodan Milosevic for the Serbs, and Franjo Tudjman for the Croats. All four are dead now, but the agreement, with its flaws, lives on.
It did bring an end to a bloody war. At the same time, the structure of government it set up has proved in its complexity and structural divisiveness over the intervening 22 years to be virtually unworkable. The population of Bosnia-Herzegovina has dropped by 20 percent since the end of the war. It has not yet come even near to meeting the requirements of the European Union for adhesion, considered to be the ticket to eventual economic healing.
Whether Mr. Mladic being punished by an international court for his crimes during the war will move the healing process along remains to be seen. What is most likely is that a new “Dayton” agreement to restructure government in Bosnia-Herzegovina, requiring greater cooperation among its Serb, Croat, and Muslim elements in governing the country, will be necessary.
No party, including the United States, has yet stepped forward to undertake that task. Nor have the leaders of the different factions in Bosnia-Herzegovina indicated a willingness to negotiate.
First Published December 4, 2017, 10:45 p.m.
