26 May 2011: Arrest of Ratko Mladić
On 26 May 2011, General Ratko Mladić was captured and arrested after avoiding arrest for 16 years.
Ratko Mladić © Mikhail Evstafiev
The 69-year-old had been living under an assumed name in northern Serbia. Following the arrest of Radovan Karadžić in 2008, Ratko Mladić became the most high-profile war crimes suspect still at large from the Bosnian War.
In 1995, a five-day campaign in Srebrenica overseen by General Mladić led to around 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys being killed by Serb forces. The women, children and the elderly were forced to leave Srebrenica, an area that had been declared safe by UN troops. The massacre was the largest act of mass murder in Europe since World War Two.
Following his arrest in 2011, Ratko Mladić was extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal of the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) where he was put on trial. In November 2017, he was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war from 1992 until 1995 and sentenced to life imprisonment.
