BBC special correspondent Allan Little describes meeting Ratko Mladić in the first summer of the Bosnian war as an encounter with a man who seemed, even then, dangerously fanatical, a judgment borne out by what followed. The Allan Little Mladić Bosnia account, first broadcast by the BBC, offers a ground-level record of a conflict that produced the worst war crimes on European soil since the Nazis.
Fires across the valley
At night, Little wrote, you could watch the fires of ethnic cleansing across the landscape. The flames were the only light under the night sky; the black valley would glimmer with flecks of orange. The men of his village moved silently in the shadows of their homes, each carrying some ancient weapon handed down through the generations alongside the fears, the suspicions and the distrusts.
One morning he watched a procession emerge from a forest: men and women driven from their homes two days earlier, fleeing with what they could carry. Most were on foot; some were crammed into the backs of ancient farm vehicles drawn by donkeys. There were perhaps 40,000 of them. Their home town had fallen to a Serb advance that came without warning.
One man among the procession seemed close to collapse. He stopped to speak to Little. The whole town had fled, he said. He had become separated from his wife on the long trek to safety and feared she had not made it. His pale, almost translucently white skin was stretched across the bones of his face like parchment; his forehead was livid blue from a fall. He said he was 80. Little asked whether he was a Croat or a Muslim. ‘I am,’ the man replied, ‘a musician.’ The memory of the question, Little wrote, shames him still.
Allan Little Mladić Bosnia: a handshake at Lukavica barracks
Little met Mladić in that first hot summer of the war at Lukavica barracks on the southern edge of Sarajevo. The barracks was awash with weapons and the menacing strut of paramilitaries. A Kalashnikov could be bought for 200 dollars, a hand grenade for just one dollar, the same price, Little would soon learn, as a fresh egg in the besieged city.
Mladić shook Little’s hand and held it fast, pulling him close. He said he had just returned from the Sarajevo city-centre front line and was, in Little’s words, pumped up by the exhilarating proximity of the fighting. He held Little’s hand for many minutes, fixed him with his eye and declared himself the great defender of brotherhood and unity in former Yugoslavia, saying he dreamed of a world with no guns and no war. ‘He struck me then as fanatical, dangerously so,’ Little wrote.
The forces under Mladić’s command went on to besiege Sarajevo, with the deaths of more than 10,000 people, and carried out the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica, according to BBC News. They bequeathed to the lexicon of war a grim new euphemism (ethnic cleansing) committing mass murder, extermination, mass rape and forced expulsions across Croatia and Bosnia in the name of creating an ethnically pure Serbian territory. At Srebrenica, ultimately, they committed genocide.
Flight, trial and sentence
After the war, Mladić spent 16 years on the run before being tracked down in rural Serbia in 2011 and put on trial in the Dutch city of The Hague, BBC News reported. He was jailed for life in 2017 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the wars in the former Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1995. The sentence was upheld on appeal by the UN court in 2021.
Two days after Little met the old musician on that damp, muddy roadside, the war reached him directly. His cameraman, Tihomir Tunukovic, a man he had known and worked alongside during the previous 18 months, was killed by a Serb gunner on a ridge above the road he was driving on. Tunukovic, from Zagreb, was 25 years old. Little and the crew drove his body back along the rutted mountain pathways to the coastal city of Split. ‘We broke our hearts at his funeral,’ Little wrote.
The grief, Little reflected, connected him to the sentiments of the war: the impulse to vengeance and counter-vengeance that were so much a feature of what he was witnessing. Mladić did not pull the trigger, he wrote, ‘but his command created an atmosphere of wanton permissiveness which cost tens of thousands of lives.’ The life sentence upheld in 2021 stands as the legal record of that command. BBC coverage of the Balkans conflict, including Little’s dispatches from the region, is archived at BBC UK.
