BELGRADE, Serbia — Sixteen years after the bull-necked military commander went on the run, a pale and shrunken Ratko Mladic was hauled into a courtroom Thursday to face charges of genocide in ordering torture, rape and the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
A Serbian government that has changed mightily since Mladic’s alleged atrocities trumpeted his early-morning arrest as a victory for a country worthy of EU membership and Western embrace. It banned all public gatherings and raised security levels to prevent ultra-nationalists from making good on pledges to pour into the streets in protest.
Mladic was one of the world’s most wanted men and faces charges of genocide and war crimes at the U.N. war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, where judge Fouad Riad said there was evidence of “unimaginable savagery.”
“Thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers’ eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson,” Riad said during Mladic’s 1995 indictment in absentia.
Mladic, 69, appeared frail and walked very slowly Thursday evening as he went into a closed-door extradition hearing. Mladic’s lawyer said the judge cut short the questioning because the suspect’s “poor physical state” left him unable to communicate.
“He is aware that he is under arrest, he knows where he is, and he said he does not recognize the Hague tribunal,” said attorney Milos Saljic, adding that Mladic needs medical care and “should not be moved in such a state.”
Belgrade B-92 radio said one of Mladic’s arms was paralyzed — probably the result of a stroke.
Extradition proceedings could take a week or more before Mladic’s expected transfer to The Hague, where he faces life imprisonment. The U.N. court has no death penalty.
The arrest releases Serbia from widespread suspicion that it was protecting Mladic.
An official close to Serbian President Boris Tadic said the president had personally overseen the arrest operation and compared it to President Barack Obama’s involvement in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
Mladic was idolized and sheltered by ultra-nationalists and ordinary Serbs despite a 10 million euro ($14 million) Serbian government bounty, plus $5 million more offered by the U.S. State Department.
His life on the lam ended before sunrise Thursday in the village of Lazarevo, 50 miles north of Belgrade. Agents of Serbia’s domestic-intelligence agency moved quietly on an unremarkable single-story yellow brick house with a small garden and a low fence, owned by a relative of Mladic’s mother.
Among all the horrors Mladic is charged with, foremost is the July 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, which was supposed to be a safe zone guarded by Dutch peacekeepers.
