Daily News Channel
Defiant and unrepentant, former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic made his first appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Friday, in a preliminary hearing during which he refused to enter a plea to the 11 counts against him — including genocide, extermination, and murder.
In the years following the Cold War and the hemorrhaging of Yugoslavia, Serbia earned the dubious distinction as Europe’s pariah state, widely viewed as a brutal aggressor in the Balkan wars.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has successfully brought dozens of war criminals to justice, but a “truth commission” is still necessary if the region’s ethnic factions are ever to achieve lasting reconciliation, according to a former legal adviser to the court.
Serbian authorities have put up wanted posters for war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic at police stations across the country in their search for the highest-ranking figure from the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict to remain at large, according to Serbian media reports. Mladic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the killing of almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995.
Former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic has been found not guilty of war crimes in Kosovo by a U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
A U.N. tribunal is expected to issue verdicts Thursday in the case against former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic and five other top Serb officials accused of war crimes committed in 1999 in the Serbian province of Kosovo