Ratko Mladić committed genocide. His death reminds me why I reject the charge against Israel

JTA – In keeping with Jewish tradition and the directive of Proverbs 24:17, I don’t rejoice at the death of Ratko Mladić. I do, however, take profound satisfaction in the fact that the survivors of his crimes and the families of his victims have seen him spend the past 15 years in a prison cell. 

Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general who died on Thursday, 27 August, in a prison hospital at The Hague, was convicted of the crime of genocide in November 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Reviled as the “Butcher of Bosnia” by Bosnian Muslims and obscenely hailed as a hero by Bosnian Serbs and Serbs generally, he was serving a life sentence at the time of his death. 

Over the years, in my prior capacity as general counsel and associate executive vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, I stood numerous times at the Srebrenica cemetery in eastern Bosnia together with survivors of the genocide he perpetrated there. As a law professor at Cornell and Columbia, and in direct appeals to the Jewish community at large, I have long held up Mladić as epitomising the legal definition of genocide. Reminding ourselves collectively why this case is especially important at a time when people who should know better, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, indiscriminately and irresponsibly hurl the charge of “genocide” against the State of Israel. 

Simply put, I believe that as a matter of prevailing international law, while Mladić perpetrated a genocide at Srebrenica, Israel did not do so in its two-year war against Hamas in Gaza. 

To understand why Mladić was a genocidaire par excellence, as it were, one must understand the context in which he committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. 

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), one of six republics that made up the artificial Balkan nation of Yugoslavia, carved together out of parts of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after World War I, was, and is, multi-ethnic in character. In 1992, when BIH seceded from Yugoslavia, 43% of its population was Muslim, 35% Orthodox Serb, and 18% Roman Catholic Croat. 

From 1992 until 1996, Mladić, who had previously been a career military officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, was the commander of the paramilitary forces of the breakaway Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, more commonly known as Republika Srpska. During these years, together with Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić, he orchestrated the brutal ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from territories they and other Serbian ultra-nationalists wished to integrate into a de facto “Greater Serbia”. 

Mladić also directed the shelling of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, spreading terror throughout the Bosnian capital’s civilian population. He took United Nations (UN) personnel hostage in violation of the laws and customs of war, and, most relevant here, was personally responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Bosniaks – that is, Bosnian Muslims – in Srebrenica, located within a heavily Serb part of BIH. 

In 1993, in response to large-scale atrocities committed by Republika Srpska forces against Bosniak civilians, the UN Security Council designated “Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area, which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act”. The Srebrenica “safe area” was ostensibly under the guard of a UN protection force, and tens of thousands of Bosniaks were misled into seeking refuge there. 

In early July 1995, when Republika Srpska troops under Mladić’s command took control of Srebrenica, the Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion known as Dutchbat shamefully abandoned the enclave’s Bosniaks in an act of mind-boggling cowardice. On 11 July, Mladić was filmed at Srebrenica declaring that “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift” and derogatorily referring to Bosniaks as “Turks” that “the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region”. 

Over the course of the next several days, acting on Mladić’s orders, the general’s thugs – there is no more sanitised way to describe them – callously and systematically murdered more than 8 000 Bosniak men and boys, raped Bosniak women, and forcibly expelled around 25 000 Bosniak women, children, and elderly men from Srebrenica. Ten years later, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described what occurred at Srebrenica as “a terrible crime – the worst on European soil since World War II”. Annan made this statement in July 2005, 17 years before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

Memo to Mamdani, El-Sayed, and others of their ilk: What happened at Srebrenica in July 1995 was far more analogous to Hamas’s butchery of Israelis on 7 October than to anything Israel did in Gaza in the subsequent two years. 

Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide is defined as one or more of certain specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. 

There can be no question that Mladić’s actions fell foursquare within that definition. In 2007, the International Court of Justice held that the acts committed at Srebrenica “were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such; and accordingly, that these were acts of genocide”. 

Specifically, as successive ICTY trial and appellate chambers concluded, the killings at Srebrenica did not have any other purpose. Rather, the “intent” manifested by Mladić and five other Bosnian Serbs convicted of genocide by that tribunal was to destroy the Bosniak presence in that part of BIH. 

That is the fundamental, irrefutable difference between Srebrenica and Gaza. On 8 October 2023, some two million Palestinians were living in Gaza. Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, the anticipation of Israel’s government, notwithstanding statements to the contrary by some of its far-right extremist members, was that when the fighting eventually stopped, some two million Palestinians would still be living there. Thus, Israel’s dolus specialis, its specific intent, in waging that war was not to destroy the Palestinian presence in Gaza but to remove that terrorist organisation as an existential threat. This motivation and the accompanying circumstances effectively negate the requisite genocidal intent on Israel’s part. 

Despite his horrific crimes, Serbs and Bosnian Serbs continue to revere Mladić as a national symbol and martyr. Serbia’s Minister of Justice announced he will be buried with the “highest military and state honours”. The ultra-nationalist former Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik says of him that “for the Serbian people” he was “a great personality”. In keeping with this sentiment, enormous murals lionising Mladić as a hero have become shrines in present-day BIH and Serbia. For the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, for the families of the thousands murdered there, and for Bosniaks throughout BIH and around the world, this is tantamount to having larger-than-life images of Hitler, Himmler, or Eichmann on prominent display in Germany. 

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Holocaust survivor and Night author Elie Wiesel said, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must, at that moment, become the centre of the universe.” 

In July 1995, Srebrenica indeed became the centre of the universe, and it must become so again, at least for a moment, in the immediate aftermath of Mladić’s death. 

Today, my thoughts are with Almasa Salihović, who was eight years old when Mladić’s men literally tore her brother out of her arms and took him to be killed. 

My thoughts are with Azir Osmanović, who survived a death march away from Srebrenica as a 13-year-old boy while his 16-year-old brother, Azmir, who was part of a group of unarmed boys, did not. 

And they are with my friend Emir Suljagić, the fearless, principled director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, who was an interpreter for Dutchbat in July 1995. He survived only because an American NATO official stationed in Tuzla in effect ordered Dutchbat headquarters to take all necessary measures “to ensure the safety and safe evacuation” of Suljagić and another Bosniak interpreter. 

It is with them, through them, that we must contemplate who Ratko Mladić was, the crimes he committed, and his gruesome, permanent legacy. 

• The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the SA Jewish Report, JTA, or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.