from Judy Miriga
Folks,
The Global Fight Against Corruption and Impunity is bearing fruits….!
God promised Humanity Unity, Peace and Love….That is our goal-post….
2011 has set the stage for the realistic sustainable Global Justice that which will usher Peace with “Thou Must Love Thy Neighbour As Thou Lovest Thyself” in order to enjoy God’s Blessings upon which He God Created the Universe……(The World)……Where there will be no more man-made inflicted pain, sufferings or poverty, that God did not create poverty to the poor, and there will be no escape without consequences.
No one is too big, too small or too smart for justice….. ICC Hague is true and real, and the Law Shall set us all free and free indeed…..
Pay attention and listen to the voice calling from the wilderness…..!
In all our doings…..God has the last say…..!
God Bless Us All and help us see His beaming majestic light and power……..
Cheers everybody………. !
Judy Miriga
Diaspora Spokesperson
Executive Director
Confederation Council Foundation for Africa Inc.,
USA
http://socioeconomicforum50.blogspot.com
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From: UNNews
Subject: CHARGES AGAINST RECENTLY ARRESTED FUGITIVES MUST EXPOSE SEXUAL CRIMES — UN ENVOY
New York, May 29 2011 5:05PM
Welcoming the recent arrests of two men long sought for their roles in the Balkans conflicts and the Rwandan genocide, a top United Nations official today stressed the need to ensure that the crimes of sexual violence they both stand accused of are exposed in the legal process under way.
Ratko Mladiæ was apprehended last week in Serbia after evading capture for almost 16 years, while Bernard Munyagishari was arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Margot Wallström, said that the indictments of the two men show that the fight against impunity for crimes of conflict-related sexual violence continues to yield results.
“In most media reports on their respective apprehension, however, sexual violence used as a tactic or weapon of war is repeatedly neglected from being mention
ed,” she said in a statement.
Mr. Mladiæ, the war-time leader of the Bosnian Serb forces, is awaiting transfer to The Hague, where he will stand trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
He is charged with 15 counts that include the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995. In the indictment, sexual abuse or sexual violence is mentioned five times.
Mr. Munyagishari, the former head of the Interahamwe Hutu militia for the city of Gisenyi in western Rwanda, is charged with five counts that include genocide, and rape as a crime against humanity, during the slaughter of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus that took place in little more than three months beginning in April 1994.
He is awaiting transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), which is based in Arusha, Tanzania.
“It is crucial that the terrible acts of sexual violence they both stand accused of are exposed in
the legal process currently under way,” stated Ms. Wallström.
“Only by explicitly bringing these horrible deeds into the open can we help to break history’s greatest silence.”
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Ratko Mladic: career officer infamous for the Srebrenica massacre
Military mastermind of Bosnia’s destruction repeatedly claimed he was on a mission of vengeance
The capture of Ratko Mladic, the military mastermind of the destruction of Bosnia, closes more than a decade of deceit for many parties in the Balkans and beyond.
Serbia’s post-Slobodan Milosevic democracy remained stigmatised and isolated for as long as its military, security structures and gangsters sheltered the general.
The United Nations, the Nato alliance, the Dutch state, the French Republic, and the world’s mightiest spy services were all tainted by their appeasement of Mladic and by the long failure or reluctance to apprehend the man said to be the most infamous mass murderer in Europe.
For the prosecutors and investigators in The Hague, finally getting Mladic in the dock will represent the climax to 16 years of often thankless toil among the mass graves, government filing cabinets, video archives, and questioning of witnesses in the Balkans.
Mladic and his partner-in-crime, Radovan Karadzic, were the military and political leaders, dubbed the psychopath and the psychiatrist, of the Bosnian Serbs in the 1992-95 war. The men, both of whom are now in custody – Karadzic was seized by Serbian intelligence in 2008 – were, at least initially, the creatures of the Milosevic regime in Belgrade.
Mladic is most infamous for the biggest single massacre of the Bosnian war at Srebrenica towards the war’s end in 1995.
But for the previous four years he was the most ruthless and determined instrument of Milosevic’s disastrous strategy to hijack Yugoslavia and carve a Greater Serbia out of the ruins of Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.
It was a project that failed spectacularly. Kosovo is now an independent state carved out of Serbia while Croatia and Slovenia next month will be celebrating 20 years since they declared their independence from Yugoslavia.
In June 1991, weeks before the Yugoslav wars opened with the skirmishing in Slovenia, Mladic – a career Yugoslav army officer and graduate of Belgrade military academies – was made military commander of the Yugoslav army garrison in Knin, a dusty provincial centre in south-west Croatia that was the seat of the Serb insurgency in Croatia.
Within six months he had helped Milosevic partition Croatia, seizing control of a quarter of the country and in the process pulverising the Danube town of Vukovar, which became the scariest symbol of that campaign. Those gains were then consolidated behind a UN peace plan in January 1992, devised by Cyrus Vance, the former US secretary of state who became UN special envoy to the region.
Two months after that plan came into effect, Milosevic, aware of Mladic’s unruly and Bonapartist displays, pulled his henchman out of Croatia into his native Bosnia, where he rallied his devotees. According to his army file obtained by investigators in The Hague, he was made commander of the Bosnian Serb military in May 1992 when Milosevic purged the high command in Belgrade and formally separated the Bosnian from the Yugoslav military.
What followed the Mladic appointment was a whirlwind of murder, pogrom, siege, and destruction giving birth to the term “ethnic cleansing”.
A senior UN official, who spent hours haggling with Mladic from the early days in Knin, characterised him as “a psychopath – highly intelligent and profoundly violent”.
Mladic liked nothing better than to parade as a proud Serbian military officer, mixing with and confronting French brigadiers, British generals and US commanders on equal terms.
His war in Bosnia, however, was that of both the bully and the coward – a war against defenceless civilians. Within a few months of the start of the Bosnian war, by the end of 1992, Mladic’s blitzkrieg had left tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims dead, put two million to flight, their homes looted and torched, their cemeteries and mosques bulldozed into oblivion.
His forces already controlled 70% of Bosnia and instituted a Nazi-style racist reign of terror aimed at the expulsion of almost all non-Serbs.
The 15 counts of genocide, murder, extermination, hostage-taking, and persecution he now faces in The Hague were the means, according to the chargesheet, to “the elimination or permanent removal, by force or other means of Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat or other non-Serb inhabitants from large areas of Bosnia”.
The Srebrenica massacre – he entered the enclave in July 1995 with the sinister assurance, “Don’t worry, no one will be harmed” – was the terrible climax of the Serbian project in Bosnia.
By the end of the same year he had been indicted for genocide at Srebrenica, while already facing a host of other charges over ethnic cleansing and the three-year siege of Sarajevo imposed by his forces.
If that was the cost of the professional, military, and career victories Mladic believes he chalked up in Bosnia, the three-and-a-half-year war there also inflicted crushing personal losses on a man who clearly relished the macho male culture of the Balkan military caste but who grew up in the company of women – his mother, sister, wife, and daughter.
Mladic was born into another bloodbath – the Serb-Croat war and Serbian civil war that ran in tandem with the second world war in Yugoslavia. Mladic was born in the village of Bozinovici, near the town of Kalinovik in eastern Herzegovina in March 1942. It is stark mountain territory on the western fringes of Serbdom, home to the kind of frontier folk that make the most fanatical breed of nationalists. Several Serbian nationalist leaders of the 1990s in Belgrade are from the same region.
When Mladic was three years old at the end of the war, his father, a partisan fighting with Tito’s forces, was killed during an assault on the Bosnian village of Bradina, home to Ante Pavelic, the fascist leader of the wartime Croatian Ustasha state.
In the 90s Mladic repeatedly claimed to have been traumatised by his father’s death and to always have been on a mission of vengeance, although the greater family tragedy came in 1994 when Mladic’s adored daughter, Ana, a 23-year-old Belgrade medical student, killed herself at the height of the Bosnian war.
Mladic and his sister were reared by his mother. A colleague who spent hours with Mladic on Mount Igman overlooking Sarajevo in the mid-90s recounted how the general dwelt obsessively and at length on his mother, daughter and sister.
When Ana killed herself, a distraught Mladic went to the mortuary in Belgrade where a senior Yugoslav Muslim doctor was on duty. According to Mirko Klarin, an authority on Yugoslav war crimes, Mladic bellowed at the doctor, ordering him out on ethnic grounds. He then proceeded to apply make-up to his daughter’s face.
Whatever the impact of family tragedy and tension on the general, amateur psychologists speculated that the suicide unhinged Mladic, contributing to eruptions of rage and violence in Gorazde in 1994 when he faced down and bested Britain’s General Sir Michael Rose, at Bihac in 1995 when he responded to Nato air strikes by taking 200 UN troops hostage, and finally at Srebrenica.
Since then, in the early days of life as a fugitive he lived reasonably openly, clearly feeling he had nothing to fear. He was frequently sighted in the better suburbs of Belgrade, in city restaurants, at football games, going to weddings. Only after 2002 did Mladic perform a disappearing trick, fearing that his impunity was eroding.
Over the past few years, after a long period of doing nothing to address the toxic issue of war crimes and atrocities, the Serbian government started coaxing senior police and military figures into surrendering to The Hague tribunal.
Karadzic, Mladic’s peer, partner and sometime rival, was seized by Serbian intelligence in July 2008 while riding on a Belgrade bus. He had been living under a false name in the Serbian capital, working as a spiritual healer.
Given the volume of evidence against Mladic and the sentences already handed down to many of his subordinates, it now appears inevitable that Mladic will spend all of his old age behind bars.
Cameron Charles Russell 9:59 pm on May 27, 2011 Reply
Tags: crimes against humanity, ICTY, justice ( 2 ), Mladic, peace, war crimes
On the Arrest of Ratko Mladic: hopes for justice, and for peace
In early May, there were scenes of jubilation throughout America at the killing of Osama bin Laden. Yesterday, however, there were no such scenes when the news that Ratko Mladic had been arrested, and would be extradited to the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague to face trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Arguably, however, Mladic was guilty of far worse crimes than bin Laden, having personally commanded or overseen the rape, torture, and murder of many thousands of Muslim Bosnians in the mid-1990s. He was the head of the army during the incredibly bloody and shameful episode of “ethnic cleansing” following the break-up of Yugoslavia. Why, then, the lack of celebrations? Should not the arrest of such a divisive mass murderer, after more than a decade-and-a-half on the run, be cause for joy?
Unfortunately for many Bosnians, joy is one emotion it is hard to connect to the atrocities committed during the war. Bin Laden, for all his evil, united America with a common purpose, and Americans supported an active foreign policy to satiate their desire for (re)action and, ultimately, vengeance. Mladic, however, made his reputation not by killing alone, but by ripping a country apart. The scale of the devastation and slaughter was such that almost no family was left unaffected.
Bosnia and Serbia both have been trying to move on from the past, and the arrest of Mladic has brought back many painful memories. Moreover, many in Serbia are still loyal to Mladic, or at least do not welcome yet more humiliation in front of an international audience. Rather than stirring up past animosities and memories of horrors in two countries that are trying to look ahead and not back to the past, would it have been better to put aside the interests of justice for those of peace? Mladic is an old man, protected by a group of nationalist loyalists, but no longer a threat. Does his arrest bring back painful memories and risk enflaming nationalistic backlash? If justice is served, at what price will it come?
The argument that justice mechanisms like domestic trials and international tribunals serve to heighten division rather than produce reconciliation, and thus should be forgone in favour of truth commissions or even amnesties, is an old one. But it is also an easy argument that is increasingly at odds with the facts, and with contemporary opinions. In a paper released last December [see: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/03/18/seductions-sequencing Human Rights Watch gathered the views of many individuals and organizations, from Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-Moon, to the EU, to argue that no meaningful peace can be obtained without justice also being served. As recently as 2007, scholars Katherine Sikkink and Carrie Booth Walling argued, in the Journal of Peace Research, that the experience of Latin America with trials of suspected human rights violators has promoted democracy, lessened political tensions, all without producing violent backlash.
We can hope, then, that along with the relatively somber reaction to it, the news of Mladic’s arrest will bring some small measure of peace to many who were affected by his brutality. Moreover, by extraditing Mladic, Serbia moves one step closer to EU accession, and through it, towards reconciliation with its neighbours and the international community as a whole. The trial should also serve as yet another forum to bring out the truth of the atrocities committed in the name of nationalism; the more Serbians come to terms with the horrors perpetrated in its name, the more they, and others, can move on. And, with the trial of Mladic, all of the top war criminals due for prosecution at the ICTY will have been captured, thus fulfilling a promise almost two decades old – one that few ever thought likely.
Many have seen the arrest of Mladic as a great achievement, and consider it a warning to Qadhafi and al-Bashir; but we should be wary of inflating our expectations. It took years of diplomacy to convince Belgrade that the war criminals Karadic and Mladic should be handed over. And it took the incentive of accession to the EU for the Serbian government to overcome the sentiments of its population, half of whom do not support Mladic’s extradition [link: http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2011/05/26/bosnia-mladic-arrest-ends-reign-impunity. International law is neither as weak as “realists” believe, nor as strong (yet) as idealists would like. But it is, nevertheless, increasingly carrying stronger normative weight in states’ foreign policy making decisions.
We should celebrate Mladic’s arrest, and be mindful that the the memories of the horrors that it brings up are precisely those that we hope international law can deter in the future.
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Bosnia: Mladic Arrest Ends Reign of Impunity
(New York) – The arrest of notorious fugitive Ratko Mladic almost 16 years after his indictment for genocide shows that no one is beyond the reach of the law, Human Rights Watch said today. Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army commander, is charged with 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, including the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995, the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.
“Only hours before his forces slaughtered thousands of civilians in Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic was handing out candy to Muslim children and promising their parents safe passage,” said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch’s International Justice Program. “After more than a decade and a half on the run, justice has finally caught up with the man who personified the brutality of the war in Bosnia.”
In a press conference, President Boris Tadic of Serbia confirmed that Mladic had been arrested in the early hours of May 26, 2011, on “Serbian soil.” Mladic is being transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague (ICTY).
Mladic’s capture comes almost three years after Serbia’s arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb civilian leader. Both men have been twice indicted on genocide charges for the Srebrenica massacre and for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. They have also been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. In July 2008, Serb authorities arrested Karadzic and transferred him to The Hague to stand trial before the ICTY.
The arrest of Mladic comes as EU countries are considering the opening of formal membership negotiations with Serbia. The EU has stressed that Belgrade must cooperate fully with the ICTY before talks can start. The fact that Mladic and Karadzic are now in custody shows what principled EU engagement can deliver, Human Rights Watch said. The ICTY Prosecutor is due to present his report on Serbia’s cooperation with the tribunal, among other issues, to the UN Security Council on June 6.
The authorities in Serbia had previously claimed to have no information about Mladic’s presence in Serbia. The ICTY prosecutor and independent Serbian media have alleged that Mladic was in Serbia under the protection of elements of the army outside effective control of the civilian authorities. Authorities in Belgrade acknowledged that Mladic received a Yugoslav army pension until 2002, and they have detained several people accused of helping hide him. An opinion poll conducted in Serbia released earlier this month indicated that 51% of respondents did not support Mladic’s transfer to The Hague.
“The Serbian government has shown considerable courage in arresting Mladic in the face of fierce opposition by hardliners,” said Dicker. “Belgrade’s commitment to justice should be commended.”
Human Rights Watch urged the Serbian government to continue cooperating with the Yugoslav tribunal, including by surrendering Goran Hadzic, the only remaining ICTY fugitive, who is believed to be within Serbia’s reach. Hadzic, a Croatian Serb, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the persecution of Croat and other non-Serb civilians in 1991 and 1992 in parts of Croatia controlled by rebel Serbs. Such cooperation also includes surrendering key documents and archives for ongoing and upcoming trials. Human Rights Watch said that it is crucial that the EU maintain pressure on Serbia to cooperate.
The long-awaited arrests and surrender of Mladic and Karadzic come as the ICTY is in the process of implementing its completion strategy, as mandated by the UN Security Council.
As of the end of 2009, the UN Security Council indicated that the tribunal should complete all of its work, including appeals, by the end of 2014. Although the ICTY prosecutor has amended the indictment against Mladic to speed up proceedings, it is unlikely that Mladic’s trial will be completed by that date. Human Rights Watch urged the UN Security Council to adopt a flexible approach in deciding the tribunal’s completion dates.
“It is essential that governments give the Yugoslav tribunal the support that it needs to guarantee fair and effective trials for the indicted architects of the Srebrenica massacre,” said Dicker.
Background
Mladic and Karadzic were first indicted by the ICTY in July 1995 on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes alleged to have occurred in several cities across Bosnia and Herzegovina. In a separate indictment in November 1995, the ICTY charged both Mladic and Karadzic with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes based on the mass execution of civilians after the fall of Srebrenica.
The ICTY delivered its first genocide conviction against General Radislav Krstic in August 2001, sentencing him to 46 years in prison. Krstic was second in command to Mladic of the Bosnian Serb troops at Srebrenica. In April 2004, the ICTY Appeals Chamber, while reducing Krstic’s sentence to 35 years, confirmed that genocide had occurred in Srebrenica. On June 10, 2010 the ICTY also convicted Vujadin Popovic (Chief of Security in the Drina Corps) and Ljubisa Beara (Chief of Security of the Bosnian Serb Army Main Staff) on several accounts including genocide, extermination, murder and persecution and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Topics: War crimes, Crimes against humanity, Impunity,