Why a War Criminal Remains at Large

Yesterday, a special court in The Hague convicted two Bosnian Serb military men of genocide for their part in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. But the man who is believed to be the mastermind of the killings, General Ratko Mladic, remains at large. There hasn’t been much news about him since Bosnian TV showed a series of sensational home videos of him last year. They were not of recent vintage (they might have been filmed at any point between the time he went into hiding in the 1990s to the months before they surfaced), but they showed the world’s most wanted man moving about freely, playing ping pong, popping champagne corks, toasting friends, bouncing a grandchild on his knee, admiring the beauties of nature, even crying at a funeral. Despite the countless promises over the years by various governments in Belgrade that Mladic would be arrested shortly, and the many widely-publicized actions in which special police units were seen on television searching some building where he was supposed to be hiding, the man indicted on charges of genocide for organizing the July 1995 massacre of some 8000 Bosnian Muslim men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenic is still on the run.