Bosnia monster gets his due

General Ratko Mladic was a monster, a military leader of unbridled brutality who was the cause of thousands of deaths during the three-way ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. At last his trial at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague is over and he has been sentenced to life imprisonment. He was ejected from the court for screaming at the judge, professing his innocence. There is no one less innocent on this Earth than Mladic. There were no good guys in the war, the Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs all hated each other and killed out of revenge for deeds committed three hundred years ago. It was mass slaughter and rape for more than three years. Mladic, with his rock-like face, was the worst of the bunch. He never differentiated between his "military" opponents and civilians. The latter were legitimate targets, in his view, for his artillery and sniper teams and mortar rockets and machineguns. The Bosnian Serbs did not commit every war crime during the civil war. The Croats, for example, fired shells on Bosnian Muslim families in East Mostar for two years, reducing the ancient district of the city of Mostar to ruins. Muslims killed Croats and Serbs, Croats killed Muslims and sometimes Serbs, Serbs killed Croats and Muslims. It was mayhem. Mladic stood out as the monster of monsters. He was the one who masterminded the killing of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica because he wanted that whole area to be exclusively Serb. I covered the Bosnia war as The Times defence correspondent, along with other excellent colleagues, and can say without exaggeration that it was the most dangerous time in my life. I went on to cover the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Sierra Leone. But none of them came anywhere near as life-threatening to me personally. Every day was dangerous. The press and media in general were targets as much as anyone else. Having MEDIA spread all over your flak jacket and vehicle was almost asking for trouble. There was no such thing as a safe journey whether you were in Muslim, Croat or Serb-held territory. I was shot at and mortared by the lot. Nevertheless, the one ethnic group you never wanted to come across when driving around a corner was the Serbs. They were always better armed and more likely to open fire first and see who you are second. I once was a passenger in a BBC TV armoured vehicle driven by my comrade Malcolm Brabant, a doughty war correspondent for the Beeb. He drove around a corner near the Serb-held town of Turbe and straight into an ambush of Serb tanks and armoured vehicles, their gun barrels pointing at us. Without a moment's hesitation, Malcolm performed the fastest U-turn his vehicle would allow and accelerated back round the corner. I think the U-turn took the Serbs by surprise because they didn't fire a shot. Ratko Mladic will spend the rest of his miserable life where he deserves to be, in jail.