Srebrenica and the Arrest of Ratko Mladic

This week, Ratko Mladic, ex-commander of Serbian forces during the fighting in Bosnia from 1992-1995, was arrested and is pending extradition to the International Court in The Hague to face charges of genocide. Specifically, the charges relate to the July 1995 massacre by Serbian forces of some 8,000 male Muslim Bosnians in the town of Srebrenica.

Without judging Mladic, who denies ordering the massacre, this arrest and pending prosecution marks an important point in international law. This massacre in 1995 was the worst such single massacre since World War II.

What happened at Srebrenica brings to mind what the Nazis did in Eastern Europe when they invaded the former Soviet Union in 1941. Behind the German military came groups of Einsatzgruppen (special task forces) made up of reservists and policemen. Their mission was to go into areas secured by the Wehrmacht and round up Jews, Soviet Kommissars and others, whereupon they would be gathered in groups, marched to pits and machine-gunned to death. Between 1941 and 1943, they murdered some 1.5 million people. This was the initial phase of the Holocaust.

The Einsatz units were composed of four units (A-D) with geographical responsibilities from the north in the Baltics to the south in the Ukraine. ( I have visited the site of Babi Yar at Kiev, where one of the worst mass murders took place.)  Their job was up close and grisly. They killed men, women, children and infants. Consequently, many of these killers drowned their guilty consciences in drink. Psychological problems occurred among them leading men like Heinrich Himmler to find a more impersonal method of killing the Jews. What evolved were the killing centers of Auschwitz, Treblinka and others, mostly in Poland, where gas chambers were utilized.

In addition, the Soviets carried out their own mass murder of Polish officers during their occupation of eastern Poland. Some 12,000 Polish officers were murdered in the Katyn forest during World War II.

In the case of Srebrenica, it is imperative that those who ordered and/or participated in this mass murder be brought to justice. To do less would be to trivialize the horrors of World War II in Europe.