In his statement at his appeal hearing on Wednesday, former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic who is serving a life sentence for war crimes, including genocide, committed during the Bosnian war, argued that he was only defending Yugoslavia and that he was and still is a target of NATO.
Mladic, 77, was the Bosnian Serb military leader during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sentenced him to life in prison for the Srebrenica genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war.
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Trial judges found Mladic was responsible for ethnic cleansing campaigns against Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and murdering and terrorising civilians in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo during a 43-month siege, as part of a plan to forge a “Greater Serbia” out of parts of the former Yugoslavia.
Both the defence and prosecution appealed the ruling. His defence team requests a new trial or for the sentence to be reduced.
Prosecutors, however, want Mladic to be sentenced for genocide committed in six municipalities other than Srebrenica.
Mladic said that he saw everything that happened during the war firsthand and criticised the Tribunal.
“I defend myself, I am a man who has been a professional soldier all his life. I worked honestly both in war and in peace in accordance with the laws of my country which the NATO pact destroyed,” Mladic said.
“I was in Srebrenica, as opposed to all of you,” he told the judges, telling a story about how some Bosnian Army member shot at him during the war.
Mladic argued that he was only defending his country, Yugoslavia, and that it was not him who started the war and “made a plan to attack Yugoslavia.”
