THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Last seen as a swaggering general in the Bosnian War, Ratko Mladic needed help rising from his chair for war-crimes judges Friday, his limp right hand too weak to put on earphones without assistance.
But as his arraignment proceeded, his old bluster returned as he called his indictment “obnoxious” and told judges he doesn’t want help walking “as if I were a blind man.”
The capture and trial of the Bosnian Serb wartime commander on charges of genocide and war crimes committed during the 1992-95 war closes the bloodiest chapter in European history since World War II and is nearly the final act of the Yugoslav tribunal, a court that launched a renewed era of international justice after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals.
Together with his former political boss Radovan Karadzic, Mladic, 69, is accused of orchestrating the four-year war for Serbian domination in Bosnia that cost 100,000 lives and climaxed with the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N.-declared safe zone of Srebrenica.
Mladic declined to enter formal pleas to the 11-count indictment but admitted no guilt.
“I defended my country and my people,” he said, before presiding judge Alphons Orie cut him short.
