• View PhotoFormer Bosnian Serb army commander Mladic attends his trial at the ICTY at The Hague
• View Photo
• Former Bosnian Serb commander Mladic appears in court at the ICTY in the Hague

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic made a throat-slitting gesture to a woman who lost her son, husband and brothers in the Srebenica massacre at the start of his trial on Wednesday for some of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War Two.

Mladic, now 70, flashed a defiant thumbs-up as he entered the courtroom – the last of the main protagonists in the Balkan wars of the 1990s to go on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

A hero to Serb nationalists, the “Butcher of Bosnia” to his Muslim and Croat victims, the pugnacious general eluded justice for 16 years until his capture in a cousin’s farmhouse in Serbia last May.

The list of 11 charges stemming from his actions as the Serb military commander in the Bosnian war of 1992-95 ranges from genocide to murder, acts of terror and crimes against humanity.

He is accused of orchestrating not only the week-long massacre of 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica but also the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 people were killed by snipers, machine guns and heavy artillery.

Mladic, who refused to enter a plea, cuts a much frailer figure now than his bullish, strutting wartime persona – his defense lawyer said he had suffered three strokes and a heart attack. But he appears to have lost none of his defiance.

In the public gallery, Munira Subasic, whose 18-year-old son, husband and brothers were killed in Srebrenica, stared at him from behind a glass barrier, crossing her wrists to imitate handcuffs.

Mladic stared back and drew a hand across his throat. Presiding judge Alphons Orie promptly called a brief recess and ordered an end to “inappropriate interactions.”

“I thought I would see at least some remorse in his eyes when I came here,” Subasic said. “But instead I saw his bloodthirstiness. I don’t know how he can live with what he did, with killing so many people.”

BROADCAST IN SARAJEVO

The proceedings were broadcast live on big screens in Sarajevo, where thousands were killed by snipers or artillery while queuing for water or bread, or crossing the street.

Hasna Hadzic, a pensioner who survived the siege, stopped off on her way from the market, visibly shaken.

“I feel like crying when I think of what he has done to us: killed 8,000 in Srebrenica alone, killed people in Foca, Visegrad, our children in Sarajevo,” she said, wiping away tears.

“They shouldn’t have put him on trial. They should have liquidated him immediately.”

But in Pale, the mountain stronghold from which Serb forces orchestrated the siege and bombardment of the capital 16 km away, applause broke out in cafes every time Mladic appeared on the television screens.

“Crimes were committed by all sides,” said Serb student Mladen Mancic. “This is just an honorable man who defended the Serb people. If it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be here today.”

Mladic was in command of the Bosnian Serb army when, over several days in July 1995, Serb fighters attacked the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia, theoretically under the protection of Dutch U.N. peacekeepers.

Video footage shot at the time showed Mladic mingling with Muslim prisoners. Shortly afterwards, the men and boys were separated from the women, stripped of identification, and shot.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome, beginning a two-day opening statement, said Mladic and other Bosnian Serbs had been implementing a grand plan to eliminate non-Serbs from large areas of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia.

“The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes,” he said.

FOOTAGE OF SIEGE

Bosnian Muslim leader Bakir Izetbegovic said he hoped the trial could at least start closing a gulf between Bosnia’s Serb and Croat-Muslim halves that shows little sign of closing, 17 years after the war ended.

“Half of Bosnia was cleansed of non-Serbs … They wanted to erase all traces and evidence of the existence of others from this part of the territory, and under the command of Ratko Mladic they succeeded,” he said.

“Many people in Bosnia are still not ready, 16 years after the war ended, to face the truth … This is the first step in the process of reconciliation.”

In court, prosecutors screened footage of bodies piled up on the streets of Sarajevo and people running in terror from the Serb onslaught.

“There can be no doubt that Mladic controlled the shelling of Sarajevo,” Groome said.

“Mladic participated in a campaign of sniping and shelling against the besieged city of Sarajevo in order to spread terror among its civilian population.”

Mladic is also held responsible for the imprisonment of non-Serbs in a system of camps, including Omarska, Prijedor and Keraterm, where they were raped, abused and murdered.

The horrors of Sarajevo and Srebrenica eventually galvanized world opinion in support of the campaign of Western air strikes on Bosnian Serb targets that brought the conflict to an end.

Mladic was indicted in 1995 along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs’ political leader, who is also on trial in The Hague. Yet both remained free in Serbia for more than a decade before being tracked down.

Mladic has dismissed the charges as “monstrous” and says he is too ill to endure a trial that may last two years or more. At the end of the hearing he looked tired and was given medication.

Some victims fear that time and failing health could help him avoid judgment like his mentor Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the Balkan wars, who died in detention in 2006 – a few months before a verdict in his trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Defense lawyer Branko Lukic said that after his strokes and heart attack, Mladic “will never be ok”, but that his health had been improving thanks to treatment in detention.

The prosecution case alone is projected to last 200 hours, with testimony from 411 witnesses, and defense lawyers say they have not had have enough time to review the huge case file.

The judges said on Wednesday that prosecutors had made “very significant errors” in disclosure of evidence, and that they would consider giving the defense more time.

Civil Administration issues demolition order against the school, though residents have no access to any other.

Haaretz

A Palestinian elementary school was shut down last week after Israel’s Civil Administration confiscated the vehicle used to transport teachers to it.

Teachers initially tried coming to the school, located in the Jinba cave village in the southern Hebron hills, by donkey, but this proved disruptive since they were often late.

On Sunday, the administration also confiscated the car of a veterinarian employed by the Palestinian Authority when he came to the village to vaccinate sheep. The vehicles were seized as part of a stepped-up enforcement campaign in Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control.

The Civil Administration also issued a demolition order against the school, though residents have no access to any other school: The nearest is in Yatta, 20 kilometers away.

In addition, it ordered an access road, tents, mud huts, sheepfolds and solar energy facilities razed, reinstating demolition orders frozen by agreement with the state prosecution in 2007.

In 1999, the area was declared a live-fire exercise zone by the Israel Defense Forces, meaning people aren’t allowed to live there. The residents were evicted but petitioned the High Court of Justice, which issued an interim injunction allowing them to return until it issues a final ruling. Ever since, the case has been stuck in court, with the state requesting and receiving continual postponements of the deadline for filing its response. Last month, the state promised to file its response within 30 days.

The residents’ attorney, Shlomo Lecker, told Haaretz that the wave of confiscations and demolition orders is a serious violation of the High Court’s injunction. “It’s the state that asked to delay hearing the petition for the last 12 years, and you can’t expect hundreds of residents of the cave village to have their lives put on hold for such a long time – that the access road to the site would be blocked, and they would be denied the possibility of giving their children compulsory education,” he said.

Dror Etkes, who has monitored West Bank settlement activity for years, told Haaretz that three settlement outposts had recently expanded into the live-fire zone: Avigail, Mitzpeh Yair and Havat Ma’on. “But as far as I know, there are no restrictions on their movement in the area, and none of their vehicles have been confiscated,” he said. “I also don’t know of any active army exercise area within this live-fire zone. In most of it, there never were any exercises.”

The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories said the court would hear the petition against the army’s declaration of the live-fire zone in a few days, and the state would give its response there.

A predominant focus in the recent case of the sex gang found guilty of abusing teenagers in Manchest…

The moralistic Chief Rabbi will not be on “Thought for the Day” expressing sorrow for the treatment of these prisoners. Ardent British Zionists will not be pressed to condemn those responsible for the state barbarism. You certainly won’t get a big TV hit like Homeland, (based on Hatufim, an Israeli TV series that fictionalised the capture by Palestinian militants of the IDF soldier Gilad Shalit) being made about these men. Come on, you cool, edgy TV chaps, how about a film about a handsome Palestinian held by the Israelis till he loses his mind? Do I hear a choral “No”?

Western opinion formers have been indifferent, in some cases knowingly so, about what is happening. No condemnations are heard around our Parliament. They say we must have freedom of speech, but that right is never evoked when it comes to Israel. The BNP and EDL can spread their racist poison freely, but Baroness Jenny Tonge is savaged by Zionists and her own party for saying that nation “is not going to be there forever in its present form”. She has just quit the Lib Dems. If she had uttered the same words about, say, Zimbabwe, she would have been acclaimed.

A large number of enlightened British Jews see the double standards and object to Israel’s intransigence. It must be so hard to do what they do, behave with integrity and empathise with those they are instructed to hate.

The detained Palestinians are embarked on peaceful, Gandhian protest action. They want their families to be able to visit without restrictions, decent medical treatment, not to be put into solitary confinement for years on end, to be taken to court and tried. How is that “terrorism”? With the 1981 IRA hunger strikers, of whom 10 died, even the most anti-Republican British newspapers published pictures and told us what was happening. TV too covered their journeys to the very end.

With these slowly dying inmates and the 6,000 others locked up without due process, there is nothing, nada. I never knew until this week that since 1967, 700,000 Palestinians have been detained. Not all were innocent but nor were all of them guilty. To be a Palestinian, to want equality, rights, freedom and land is not a crime. Except that for hardline Israelis, it is.

Their country is protected from censure partly because of fears that any criticism of its actions is potentially “anti-Semitic”. Some anti-Semites do use Israel as a cover, but then Israel uses that fact to tar and warn all legitimate criticism. Its governments do what they damn-well want and claim perpetual exceptionality. Their darkest deeds are thus left unscrutinised. This time though, it is suddenly dawning on some key people, among them the hapless Middle East saviour Tony Blair, that these “martyrs” could trigger another Intifada. He is urging Israeli officials to “take all measures to prevent a tragic outcome that could have serious implications for stability and security”. Why, he even uttered the words “human rights”. The UN and other bodies have intervened. They will all be rebuffed, so monstrous are the egos of the ultra-right wing leadership. In any case Netanyahu et al can point – and with absolute validity – at Guantanamo Bay and our own prisoners held without trial. They are all in it together.

Blair is right to be fearful. Every time a hunger striker dies, even more inchoately angry young Muslim men will be radicalised and turn murderous. Some are raised in the West filled with rhetoric about freedom, democracy, fairness and justice and then witness the betrayal of Palestinians. That dissonance between principles and reality makes them, perhaps, even more enraged than the Palestinians themselves who have low expectations and few illusions. This is not making excuses for terrorists, it is just a reality check.

I truly want Israel to survive and thrive but it is becoming its own worst enemy. British activist Tom Hurndall, 21, was sheltering a Palestinian child from Israeli bullets in Gaza in 2003, when he was killed. His candid journals have just been published. Read them and mourn the idealistic young man and the loss of all idealism in Israel.