LONDON — War-crimes suspect Ratko Mladic was thrown out of court at The Hague on Monday after he shouted in protest and refused to hear the allegations against him, leaving the court to enter a not- guilty plea on his behalf to charges that he oversaw acts of genocide during the 1992-95 Balkans conflict.
“I’m not going to listen anymore. You’re talking in vain,” Mladic told the International Criminal Court as the presiding judge began reading out the counts against him.
As the former Bosnian Serb general pulled off his headphones and continued to hurl abuse, the judge asked security officers to remove him from the courtroom.
Mladic, 69, is accused of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from his leadership of Bosnian Serb forces bent on carving out a Greater Serbia from what had been Yugoslavia. Troops under his command laid siege to Sarajevo for nearly four years, killing 10,000 people, and slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica in 1995 in a grisly act of “ethnic cleansing.”
Since his extradition to The Hague, the former military commander has said he does not recognize the international court’s authority.
Next week, relatives of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre will mark the 16th anniversary of the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.
