An exhibition presenting the personal diary of Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb convicted in a first-instance verdict of the war crimes and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has opened at the Eugster gallery in Belgrade this week, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) reported.
The diary was found in 2010 in Belgrade, at one of the houses where Mladic was hiding and was used as evidence material during the trial of the Bosnian Serb Army general before the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia.
The exhibition consists of a series of 400 drawings that were made based on the diary.
“Every drawing was separately framed and 400 of them were carefully displayed in the lines composing one monumental unit, which covers the walls of the whole gallery,” said Vladimir Miladinovic, the author of the exhibition symbolically called ‘Diary’.
“One of the ideas was to display the whole series at one place so that the visitors can face such important traces of the past and at the same time face the inability to deal with it,” he explained.
Mladic was arrested in 2011 and the Hague Tribunal sentenced him in November 2017 in the first-instance verdict to life prison for the Srebrenica genocide, the expulsion of Bosniaks and Croats across Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorizing the residents of Sarajevo and taking UN troops hostages during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Appeals to the first-instance verdict have been recently postponed for the second time.
His diary was used as evidence in other trials before the Hague Tribunal.
“Mladic was writing his diary on a daily basis, meaning he did handwriting of important details of his activities. Besides the content, the handwriting is also important because of the way in which he was taking notes. If he was angry or embittered, the handwriting was obviously dramatic, the letters were becoming larger and the pen marks on paper were thicker,” explained Miladinovic.
The author has been involved for years in archive research of tabooed historical periods. His previous exhibition focused on the mass graves near Belgrade covering the dead bodies of secretly buried Kosovo Albanians killed during the war.
