HE BLUSTERED, prevaricated, interrupted, and finally became so disruptive that he was removed from the court. But yesterday at the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, justice for Gen Ratko Mladic slowly began to take its course.
Having done everything to delay the inevitable, Mladic in the end was locked in a high-security holding cell as the presiding judge methodically listed 11 charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes levelled against him – and entered a not-guilty plea in each case.
Just before he was removed, and as Judge Alphons Orie began to list the alleged crimes relating to the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in 1995 and the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996 in which 10,000 others died, Mladic shouted: “No, don’t read it to me . . . not a single word.”
The apparent game-playing had started before the hearing began, with suggestions from the former Bosnian Serb commander’s Belgrade-based lawyer, Milos Saljic, that 69-year-old Mladic would boycott the court and delay his plea because his defence team had not yet been approved.
In the event, there he was in the dock, a guard on each side, when the hearing began at 10.08am local time – his second appearance since he was arrested on May 26th and extradited from Serbia to the UN detention centre outside The Hague. And when Judge Orie instructed Mladic to remove the military forage cap he had also worn briefly at his June appearance, and moments later warned him to stop communicating with the public gallery, the tone was set for the ill-tempered and halting 54-minute hearing.
“I have to wear a cap because I am too old and my head is cold . . . I want to communicate with you in a humane way, but you are trying to impose conditions on me – a lawyer I don’t want.”
Despite the interruptions, the court dealt with his insistence that he wished to have Mr Saljic and a second lawyer, Aleksander Mezyaev – who advised the late Slobodan Milosevic – represent him, rather than the Serbian attorney, Aleksander Aleksic, appointed temporarily by the court.
The judge said that although Mladic – who claims to have been treated for cancer two years ago – had refused to allow the tribunal to examine his medical records, he was satisfied that his health was not such as to inhibit a trial.
Judge Orie asked him: “Are you ready to enter a plea, yes or no?” Mladic replied: “You can do whatever you want. There’s no need for me to say anything . . . you do as you wish.”
But as the judge began to read the 37-page indictment, Mladic again interrupted, shouting and waving his hand dismissively, and the judge ordered him removed.
The tension heightened when relatives of victims in the public gallery, which is separated from the courtroom by bullet-proof glass, shouted: “He killed Muslims.”