Meeting Mladic

I once became obsessed with a huge boil on the back of General Mladic’s neck. We were in Pale — the Bosnian Serb ski-resort turned capital — at a meeting of their parliament, in the summer of ’94. I was there as the Balkans correspondent of the Observer and had, by that time, met Ratko Mladic several times. He was holding court, surrounded by henchmen, at the centre of the awestruck MPs; a menacing, enormous man with bulging arms and shoulders, like an inflatable killing doll. But it was the Butcher of Bosnia’s enormous boil that struck me. It must have caused him immense pain. Knowing what he had done, and what he went on to do, I’m glad about that.

A year later, July 1995, I was in the UN refugee camp at Tuzla airport watching the women of Srebrenica cooking for their children, darting between the tents. Srebrenica had fallen to General Mladic and his Bosnian Serb army the previous week, and these women had lost their husbands, fathers, sons and homes. But life ground on. Then, as we watched, an army of ghosts in ragged fatigues began to materialise, emerging through the smoke from the cooking fires: the surviving men of Srebrenica. As they searched through the tents, a woman would leap up with a caw of joy. The other women stopped their chores, frozen by unexpected hope. But there were not many men. Before the impotent eyes of the Dutch UN troops, General Mladic had sent the 8,000 who surrendered off to their deaths in a football stadium. Only a few had kept fighting, and made their way over the mountains to Tuzla.