Witnesses die. Memories fade. Victims move on with their lives, leaving no forwarding addresses. The passage of nearly two decades since the most heinous crimes attributed to Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic could impede his prosecution at the U.N. war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, legal analysts say.
But those familiar with Mladic’s alleged role in the worst atrocities to afflict Europe since the Nazis insist his conviction is assured despite those complications because of the enduring pain suffered by the victims of ethnic cleansing.
“There are certainly witnesses available, and for Mladic, they will come. There are people who would walk to The Hague for this,” said Marko Prelec, Balkans project director for the International Crisis Group and a former prosecution investigator at the tribunal in the Dutch administrative capital.
Mladic is accused of commanding Serb forces in the July 1995 massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica. He also faces charges of directing the deadly 1992-95 bombardment of civilians in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.
Defense attorneys for Mladic likely would try to impugn witnesses’ testimony on grounds that their recollections may be faulty, said Diane Marie Amann, an international law professor at the University of Georgia. But Amann said prosecutors probably have sufficient evidence.
