Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his actions during the Balkan wars of the Nineties, has died in prison.
BBC particular correspondent Allan Little was there all through the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and met Mladić in the early months of the Bosnian battle.
At night time, you could watch the fires of ethnic cleaning across the panorama. The flames offered the only mild under the night time sky and the black valley would glimmer with flecks of orange.
You could watch the males of our village transfer about silently in the shadows of their houses, each armed with some historic weapon salvaged from wars long in the past and, like the fears and the suspicions and the distrusts, handed down through the generations.
One morning I watched a procession of males and ladies emerge from a forest. They had been pushed from their houses two days earlier and had fled with what they could carry.
Most were on foot. Some were crammed into the back of historic farm autos drawn by donkeys. There were perhaps 40,000 of them. Their home city had fallen to a Serb advance that had come without warning.
Among them, one man appeared close to collapse. He stopped to converse to us.
The complete city had fled, he said. He had become separated from his spouse in the long trek to security and was now frightened that she had not made it. His pale, nearly translucently white pores and skin was stretched across the bones of his face like parchment. His brow was furious blue from a fall.
I requested him how previous he was. He said he was 80. “May I ask” I said, “are you a Croat or a Muslim?”
The reminiscence of it shames me even now as I hear, in my thoughts, his reply echo down the years.
“I am,” he said, “a musician”.
Our handy ethnic shorthand lowered them to Serbs, Croats and Muslims. But they were also musicians and scientists and medical doctors and plumbers and farmers and moms and fathers and brothers and sisters and very usually kids.
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