When Ratko Mladić passed away at the end of August, in custody at The Hague, his death served as a reminder of how rarely war criminals are punished for their crimes. Commander of the Army of Republika Srpska, a separatist movement of Bosnian Serbs that bitterly opposed integration in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992, Mladić gained infamy as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his role in the Srebrenica Massacre of July 1995. Desperate to unify the disparate ethnic Serbian enclaves of Bosnia and to purge liberated “Serbian” territory of its non-Serbian Bosniak Muslim population, Mladić orchestrated a campaign of ethnic cleansing that culminated in the genocidal massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica. The massacre shocked the world and led to the swift collapse of the Bosnian Serb separatist movement, as parallel military operations by Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and NATO crushed the Mladić’s army and facilitated the final peace settlement of the Dayton Accords. Mladić fled to Serbia, living at first openly in Belgrade and then in hiding until his arrest and extradition to The Hague in 2011. 

Ratko Mladić keenly understood both that ethnic cleansing could only by accomplished through genocide and that constant public denials, deceptions, and lies were necessary to allow the Serbs to “get away with genocide.” As Marko Attila Hoare has noted, ultimately responsibility for the genocide lay in Belgrade with Slobodan Milošević and the leadership of the Republic of Serbia. Even in the Republika Srpska, President Radovan Karadžić and the Bosnian Serb Assembly explicitly articulated ethnic cleansing as the principal goal entrusted Mladić and his forces. Mladić, while not exactly protesting, was somewhat more honest than his compatriots when he explained on the flood of the Republika Srpska Parliament that these objectives could only be accomplished with violence: “people… are not pawns nor are they keys in one’s pocket that can be shifted from here to there.” Mladić was similarly clear-eyed when he warned his compatriots that “misrepresentation of reality and avoidance of any public acceptance for the responsibility of crimes” was necessary to avoid international intervention. “We musn’t say that we are going to destroy Sarajevo,” he proclaimed, “We are not going to say that we are to destroy the power supply pylons or turn off the water supply, no, because that would get America out if its seat, but… well, one day there is no water at all in Sarajevo…. We have to wisely tell the world, it was they [Bosniak Muslims] who were shooting.” These chilling words do not necessarily convey novel rhetorical strategy – consider Turkish nationalist insistence that the Armenian genocide was merely a security response to Armenian violence – but they do show how the dynamics of global public opinion in the contemporary era shape rhetoric even before genocidal acts are committed.   

What distinguishes Ratko Mladić from so many other war criminals in recent history is not his ruthless commitment to murdering civilians and lying about it, but the fact that he was ultimately held to account for his crimes under international law. A small number of war criminals have been convicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) or ad-hoc tribunals charged with prosecuting crimes committed before July 2002, including Théoneste Bagosora for his role in the Rwandan Genocide. Other war criminals have been held accountable in their home countries, whether killed by rebels in the case of ex-Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi or executed by the state in the case of ex-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. For so many others, however, justice has not been served: the Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony remains at large, deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is safely exiled in Russia, and Russian President Vladimir Putin seems merely bemused by the ICC arrest warrant. International law, as I often tell students, is for losers. Only those war criminals who have been defeated on the battlefield by rebels or international forces, or “betrayed” and handed over to the ICC by new governments or host countries, will ever be held to account; surely no leader who would voluntarily turn himself over to the ICC to stand trial!

More than one Israeli commentator has used the death of Ratko Mladić to note the historical parallels between Bosnia and Gaza and to speculate on implications for the future of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the two Israeli leaders currently facing charges for crimes against humanity at the ICC. As with all historical comparisons, the events in Bosnia in the 1990s and Gaza in the 2020s are not clean parallels. While Mladić and the Bosnian Serbs followed through on their promise to tell the world “it was they [Bosniak Muslims] who were shooting” after the Srebrenica Massacre, these lies gained little traction, and international media coverage provided ready footage laying bear the victims and perpetrators. In Gaza, on the other hand, the attacks of October 7, 2023 provided a clearer example of Palestinian aggression to muddy the waters of the rhetorical debates on genocide. There are, however, clear similarities as well – one of the most striking is the question of numbers. While common sense usage associates “genocide” with the systematic elimination or attempted elimination of an entire ethnic, national, or religious group, the United Nations General Assembly Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide clearly defines genocide as a series of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” in Article II. Even though “only” 8,000 out of nearly 2,000,000 Bosniak Muslims were murdered at Srebrenica, leading some observers to wonder aloud how a “genocide” can take the lives of such a small fraction of the population, most genocide experts insist that the massacre clearly qualifies as an act of genocide. Similar arguments are used to challenge the charge of genocide in Gaza, where the population is roughly the same size as that of the Bosniak Muslims in the 1990s. While the death toll among Gazans is roughly ten times higher than the death toll among Bosniak Muslims, the total percentage of the population killed is orders of magnitude lower than in the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, or the Rwandan Genocide. How, many defenders of Israel ask, can a “genocide” leave so many would-be victims alive, particularly when Israel (unlike the Republika Srpska) clearly possesses the military capability to annihilate the entire population? While the bitter debate over the meaning and rhetoric of genocide continues to rage, the Bosnian precedent offers a clear rebuttal to that question.

Finally, what of the future of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant? How likely are they to be convicted, like Ratko Mladić, at the International Criminal Court? Will they die, like the “Butcher of Bosnia,” in custody at The Hague? As international law is for “losers,” the trial of Netanyahu and Gallant will surely be conducted in absentia, and if they are convicted, they are highly unlikely to be extradited to The Hague unless an erstwhile friendly foreign country goes rogue and orchestrates a surprise arrest, or unless and until the balance of power in Israel/Palestine changes dramatically. They are, for the time being, as safe from retribution as Vladimir Putin. What this means for their legacy and for the future of the state of Israel, however, is far less certain.