Genocide? War crimes? These words are not on the lips of locals, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLINin Bozanovici
“I WAS born on Good Monday in 1943 . . . 2½km away from Kalinovik. That is where my village of Bozanovici is.”
So said Ratko Mladic on the first day of his trial for war crimes and genocide allegedly committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict.
His first words to the United Nations court at The Hague warmed the hearts of his people back in Bozanovici and Kalinovik. Before the foreign accusers who had hunted him for so long, he had remembered them on their rugged hillside far away.
And he had remembered his faith, naming the day of his birth not by its date but its place in the Serb Orthodox calendar of Holy Week.
The slow road south to Kalinovik from Sarajevo, the city Mladic is accused of besieging for a murderous 44 months, winds past the war memorials and cemeteries that serve as marker posts on any journey through Bosnia and history.
Muslim graveyards cluster around Sarajevo, where those killed by Mladic’s men lie beside victims of an earlier war, when Tito’s communist Partisans, Serb ultra-nationalist Chetniks, Croatian fascist Ustashe units and their Nazi German allies fought over 1940s Bosnia. Muslims, fearing extermination, often joined whichever force gave them the best chance of survival in their area.
Driving deeper into Serb-dominated Bosnia, the region now known as Republika Srpska, Orthodox crosses and monuments honour generations of Serb dead with impassioned poetry, and keep alive the memory of forefathers lost to centuries of heroic defeats and doomed uprisings.
Ratko Mladic would have heard all these stories, many of which lament some 500 years of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, as he grew up in a peasant family in tiny Bozanovici.
Mladic’s father was killed when he was only two years old by Ustashe or German forces during the last months of the second World War, while fighting for the partisans who would eventually prevail and rule post-war communist Yugoslavia under leader Josip Broz Tito.
Raised by his mother with the help of his uncle and other relatives, Mladic did well enough at school in Kalinovik to escape the hard village life and enter a military and industrial college in a Belgrade suburb. From there, he joined a military academy and swiftly climbed the ranks.
As a rising star in the Yugoslav national army, Mladic returned to Bozanovici and built a house for his mother. It is modest but sturdier than the tiny house he grew up in, and both are dwarfed by the bare mountain peaks that overlook the village and wild pastures where locals herd their sheep.
It is still hard to make a living in Bozanovici and Kalinovik, and many young people follow in Mladic’s footsteps and make for Belgrade, or western Europe, as soon as they can. But despite his global notoriety, young and old here show nothing but pride in the region’s best-known son.
“You won’t hear a bad word said about him around here,” says Radovan Ceranic (66). “He is a hero, simply a hero.”
Radovan’s son, Spasoje (21), smiles proudly as he recalls meeting Mladic when he returned to Kalinovik during the war.
“I must have only been about three years old, but I still remember being with my mum and seeing him, and shaking his hand,” the student says.
Locals insist Mladic protected Serbs from a potential massacre by Bosnia’s majority Muslim population during the war. They say he treated the Muslims well in the region around Kalinovik, protecting them while he could and then urging them to leave in good time as fighting intensified.
“He is not guilty of anything. Muslims killed Serbs here first, and Mladic was sent back here as the most capable soldier. He just defended his people,” says Branko Mandic (80), who remembers Mladic as a child.
“He came from a good family, but they were poor like everyone else. He was a normal child, but always ambitious and very clever. I cried when I heard Ratko had been caught. Everyone around here did. It is a national shame for Serbia that he was betrayed and sent away for trial.”
It is easy to imagine Mladic finding refuge in this wild part of Bosnia during his 16 years on the run from international justice, when his capture was a key obstacle to Serbia and Bosnia making progress towards the European Union.
But Mandic and others insist that Mladic was not seen here after the war.
“But if he had come we would have hidden him. We have so many caves around here that he would never have been found,” Mandic says.
“He was the only good general, the only one who wasn’t corrupt. Never mind the EU. Good Serbs would never have given him up.”