'Butcher of Bosnia' Mladic to learn verdict in appeal against life sentence
In 2017, Ratko Mladic appealed against a sentence of life imprisonment for war crimes committed in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague described the atrocities carried out by troops under Mladic's command as "amongst the most heinous known to humankind". The result of his appeal will be announced on Tuesday.
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Mladic orchestrated the massacre of 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica in 1995.
That slaughter -- the worst single atrocity in Europe since World War II -- led media across the world to dub him "the butcher of Bosnia".
Former UN rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein described Mladic as "the epitome of evil" after his conviction.
But many Serbs continue to revere him.
"He only defended his people," Serb veteran Ljubo Tomovic told the French AFP news agency. "To convict him would be a disgrace and a sin."
'A simple man, protecting his people'
Mladic, who is in his late 70s, has repeatedly pushed the image of himself as "a simple man" chosen to protect his people.
"Fate put me in a position to defend my country that you Western powers had devastated with the help of the Vatican and the Western mafia," he told his appeal hearing last year.
Mladic oversaw the three-year siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, his snipers and artillery shells killing thousands of men, women and children.
Video footage from Srebrenica shows him reassuring a 12-year-old Muslim boy shortly before his soldiers massacred thousands of civilians.
Days later, he is seen returning to a deserted Srebrenica, telling the camera: "We give this town to the Serb people as a gift."
Three dangerous men
Mladic formed a Serb nationalist triumvirate with political leader, Radovan Karadzic, and Yugoslav former president, Slobodan Milosevic. Together, they unleashed a wave of ethnic killing in a bid to redraw the map of the region.
Karadzic was the ideologue, Milosevic the politician, Mladic was the soldier.
Mladic was dismissed from his army post after being indicted in 1995, but evaded capture for another 16 years. He was finally arrested in May 2011 in northern Serbia.
His wartime leadership continues to be celebrated in murals around Republika Srpska -- the Serbian entity within Bosnia.
Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik is among many who hail Mladic as a hero, telling reporters last month: "There was no genocide in Srebrenica. There is no credible evidence or any other evidence that it was genocide."
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