Ratko Mladic is dead. The meaning of genocide must live on

JTA — In keeping with Jewish tradition and the directive of Proverbs 24:17, I do not rejoice at the death of Ratko Mladic. I do, however, take profound satisfaction in the fact that the survivors of his crimes and the families of his victims have seen him spend the past 15 years in a prison cell.

Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general who died Thursday in a prison hospital at The Hague, was convicted of the crime of genocide in November 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Reviled as the “Butcher of Bosnia” by Bosnian Muslims and obscenely hailed as a hero by Bosnian Serbs and Serbs generally, he was serving a life sentence at the time of his death.

Over the years, in my prior capacity as general counsel and associate executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, I stood numerous times at the Srebrenica cemetery in eastern Bosnia together with survivors of the genocide he perpetrated there. As a law professor at Cornell and Columbia, and in direct appeals to the Jewish community at large, I have long held up Mladic as epitomizing the legal definition of genocide. Reminding ourselves collectively why this is the case is especially important at a time when people who should know better, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed, indiscriminately and irresponsibly hurl the charge of genocide against the State of Israel.

Simply put, I believe that as a matter of prevailing international law, while Mladic perpetrated a genocide at Srebrenica, Israel did not do so in its two-year war against Hamas in Gaza.

To understand why Mladic was a genocidaire par excellence, as it were, one must understand the context in which he committed genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BIH), one of six republics that made up the artificial Balkan nation of Yugoslavia, carved together out of parts of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires after World War I, was, and is, multi-ethnic in character. In 1992, when BIH seceded from Yugoslavia, 43 percent of its population was Muslim, 35% Orthodox Serb and 18% Roman Catholic Croat.

From 1992 until 1996, Mladic, who had previously been a career military officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, was the commander of the paramilitary forces of the breakaway Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, more commonly known as Republika Srpska. During these years, together with Republika Srpska President Radovan Karadžić, he orchestrated the brutal ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from territories they and other Serbian ultra-nationalists wished to integrate into a de facto “Greater Serbia.”

Mladic also directed the shelling of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995, spreading terror throughout the Bosnian capital’s civilian population. He took UN personnel hostage in violation of the laws and customs of war, and, most relevant here, was personally responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Bosniaks — that is, Bosnian Muslims — in Srebrenica, located within a heavily Serb part of BIH.

In 1993, in response to large-scale atrocities committed by Republika Srpska forces against Bosniak civilians, the United Nations Security Council designated “Srebrenica and its surroundings as a safe area which should be free from any armed attack or any other hostile act.” The Srebrenica “safe area” was ostensibly under the protection of a UN protection force, and tens of thousands of Bosniaks were misled into seeking refuge there.

In early July of 1995, when Republika Srpska troops under Mladic command took control of Srebrenica, the Dutch UN peacekeeping battalion known as Dutchbat shamefully abandoned the enclave’s Bosniaks in an act of mindboggling cowardice. On July 11, Mladić was filmed at Srebrenica declaring that “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” and, derogatorily referring to Bosniaks as “Turks,” that “The time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region.”

Over the course of the next several days, acting on Mladic’s orders, the general’s thugs — there is no more sanitized way to describe them — callously and systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, raped Bosniak women and forcibly expelled around 25,000 Bosniak women, children and elderly men from Srebrenica. Ten years later, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan described what occurred at Srebrenica as “a terrible crime — the worst on European soil since the Second World.” (Annan made this statement in July 2005, 17 years before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.)

Memo to Mamdani, El-Sayed and others of their ilk: What happened at Srebrenica in July 1995 was far more analogous to Hamas’ butchery of Israelis on October 7, 2023, than to anything Israel did in Gaza in the subsequent two years.

Under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide is defined as one or more of certain specified acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

There can be no question that Mladic’s actions fell foursquare within that definition. In 2007, the International Court of Justice held that the acts committed at Srebrenica “were committed with the specific intent to destroy in part the group of the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina as such; and accordingly, that these were acts of genocide.”

Specifically, as successive ICTY trial and appellate chambers concluded, the killings at Srebrenica did not have any other purpose. Rather, the “intent” manifested by Mladic and five other Bosnian Serbs convicted of genocide by that tribunal was to destroy the Bosniak presence in that part of BIH.

That is the fundamental, irrefutable difference between Srebrenica and Gaza. On October 8, 2023, some two million Palestinians were living in Gaza. Throughout the Israel-Hamas war, the anticipation of Israel’s government, notwithstanding statements to the contrary by some of its far-right extremist members, was that when the fighting eventually stopped, some two million Palestinians would still be living there. Thus, Israel’s dolus specialis, its specific intent, in waging that war was not to destroy the Palestinian presence in Gaza but to remove that terrorist organization as an existential threat. This motivation and the accompanying circumstances effectively negate the requisite genocidal intent on Israel’s part.

Despite his horrific crimes, Serbs and Bosnian Serbs continue to revere Mladic as a national symbol and martyr. Serbia’s Minister of Justice announced he will be buried with the “highest military and state honors.” The ultra-nationalist former Republika Srpska president Milorad Dodik says of him that “for the Serbian people” he was “a great personality.”

In keeping with this sentiment, enormous murals lionizing him as a hero have become shrines in present-day BIH and Serbia. For the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, for the families of the thousands murdered there, and for Bosniaks throughout BIH and around the world, this is tantamount to having larger-than-life images of Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann on prominent display in Germany.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, the Holocaust survivor and “Night” author Elie Wiesel said, “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

In July of 1995, Srebrenica indeed became the center of the universe, and it must become so again, at least for a moment, in the immediate aftermath of Mladic’s death.

Today, my thoughts are with Almasa Salihović, who was eight years old when Mladic’s men literally tore her brother out of her arms and took him to be killed.

My thoughts are with Azir Osmanović, who survived a death march away from Srebrenica as a 13-year-old boy while his 16-year-old brother Azmir, who was part of a group of unarmed boys, did not.

And they are with my friend Emir Suljagic, the fearless, principled director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, who was an interpreter for Dutchbat in July 1995. He only survived because an American NATO official stationed in Tuzla in effect ordered Dutchbat headquarters to take all necessary measures “to ensure the safety and safe evacuation” of Suljagić and another Bosniak interpreter.

It is with them, through them, that we must contemplate who Ratko Mladic was, the crimes he committed, and his gruesome, permanent legacy.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.