World

Dear diary: Ratko Mladic here . . .

The fugitive: His Bosnian war writings have been turned over to the court in The Hague

AP Photo / Oleg Stjepanovic

Though prosecutors at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal don’t have Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic in custody, they now know his thoughts and actions during key periods of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Last Wednesday, the war crimes prosecutors asked for 18 diaries—seized during a raid on his wife’s apartment in Belgrade—to be admitted into evidence against Mladic’s former political boss, Radovan Karadzic, on trial for war crimes. A court official who’d seen the 3,500 handwritten pages told AFP: “They recount everything that Mladic did during the war years: he noted his meetings, the dates, whom he met and what they discussed.”

On Monday, Mladic’s family announced they want him officially declared dead to “put an end to everyday pressure and prosecution” by those hunting him since the end of the war in 1995. The family lawyer says they last saw him in 2005, when his health was failing. However, Serbia, which has to hand over Mladic as a condition to join the European Union, dismissed the claim as “speculation.”

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