True To Bestial Form

His country traded him in for political stability, international recognition and material advantage in the world community. He was himself a willing participant in the trade. An end-of-life decision that he must feel has a certain nobility to it, ensuring that his family is well taken care of, while he lends himself to what he is convinced is a charade of justice.

For as he knows and as everyone else should know, he was doing no more than his duty as a devotedly loyal and courageous Serbian commander. The Butcher of Srebrenica has nothing, nothing whatever to apologize for, to ask mercy for, to beg forgiveness for.

Not from the grieving mothers who lost their sons and their civilian husbands and their brothers, nor from NATO allies who fought against his troops, nor the UN peacekeepers whom he morally compromised to become a witness to the slaughters he expressly ordered. And besides, in the best tradition of the world's butchers whom fate allowed to live long and natural lives, he is now a frail, elderly, ill man.

Have they no respect? This is not the strutting general who commanded his troops' undying respect for his commands to enact atrocities on unarmed populations, to separate men and boys from the women to dispatch them in a mass ethnic cleansing. "I am General Mladic and the whole world knows who I am", he proudly addressed the International Tribunal in the Hague.

He had done nothing less - and much more to be proud of - than to "defend my people and my country. Now I am defending myself. I want to live to see that I am a free man." And he had no intention, none whatever, of sitting by placidly while the court read out "obnoxious and monstrous" charges of criminality and crimes against humanity brought against him.

In one sitting, this man who took so much pleasure in the suffering of others, and who feels that his suffering as "a gravely ill man", should be looked on with compassion, veered from contempt for the proceedings and insisting on special accommodation in respect of his condition, to a smirking monster, proud of his accomplishments which were read out as charges after the clerk of the court called "All rise".

His pride in his accomplishments evident enough as a smile overtook his face, causing the grieving mothers sitting in the court to wail in their pain. He was placed behind a glass barrier for a good reason. But he was visible enough to all those gathered there, waving to the public gallery. Led away, back to his prison cell he turned to the families of his victims, smiled and flipped two military salutes.

"My heart breaks when I see him so old and obviously in ailing health. We should not have let this happen." Jovana Ciric, waitress in Banja Luka, the Bosnian Serb capital.