More impressions of Mladic

A few more impressions arising from Ratko Mladic’s appearance in court yesterday:

His health. At first, I thought he looked better than in previous appearances. He has thinned down considerably (his lawyer says that he has lost more than forty pounds). He looks more like a general, and less like the befuddled street vagrant he resembled on his arrest on May 26. He paid animated attention to the court proceedings, alternately nodding and scowling. On the other hand, I have no reason to doubt his lawyer’s claim that the three strokes he suffered while he was on the run have had a grave impact on his health. His right arm is pretty much paralyzed: he salutes with his left arm. After years without adequate medical care, he is now being treated for a host of neglected problems, ranging from kidney stones to toothaches to hernias.

His state of mind. His behavior is unpredictable. He veers erratically from meek compliance to flashes of extreme anger. According to people who have seen him in detention, he is liable to fly off the handle without warning. At times he is perfectly calm and cooperative but is liable to explode with rage when he feels that his dignity is offended. At times he is totally lucid; at other times, his thought processes seem nonsensical. He talked with pleasure yesterday about seeing his biographer, Ljiljana Bulatovic, in the public gallery — and then suddenly veered off into a diatribe against another woman journalist who .claimed that his security guards confiscated sweets that he had given to Moslem children in Srebrenica after capturing the town in July 1995. "This is a blatant lie," he yelled.

He is clearly a man more accustomed to giving orders than receiving them. He summons his lawyers with a wave of his finger, issuing curt demands. He treats the courtroom personnel as subordinates, referring to the court registrar as "the girl." He complains about the handcuffs that he has to wear when he is transported to the jail. By contrast, he says he has "grown accustomed" to prison procedures. He refers to his prison guards as "good guys," who are there to help him, and even praised the judge, Alphons Orie, for "looking very nice on the television screen and in the flesh." (The judge said he was "flattered," but requested Mladic to stick to the matter at hand.)

Srebrenica. He is clearly deeply offended by the focus on Srebrenica and the charge that he ordered the cold-blooded executions of 7,000-8,000 Moslem men in July 1995. During his first hearing, he would not even listen to the formal accusation of "genocide," tearing his translation headset away from his ears so that he would not have to hear the attacks on his military honor. Even though the judge did not deal with the massacre at yesterday’s hearing, Mladic raised the subject by himself, saying that the mere mention of Srebrenica "makes me angry."

His main complaint appeared to be that his accusers look at Srebrenica in isolation rather than in the context of a five-year war, first in Slovenia, then in Croatia, and finally in Bosnia. "Take it in the proper order," he demanded. "I was there from 1991 in Knin [as a Yugoslav army commander, he supported the right of Serbs to secede from Croatia after Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia.] Take it village by village, mountain by mountain, municipality by municipality." In other words, his defense will be that whatever atrocities took place at Srebrenica were not a unique event-but a reaction to earlier events in the war, and a long series of injustices and atrocities inflicted on the Serbs by their enemies.

Charisma. Even in his reduced, decrepit state, you can see why Bosnia peace negotiator Richard Holbrooke described Mladic as "one of those lethal combinations that history throws up occasionally — a charismatic murderer." The former Bosnian Serb general is easily the most compelling figure of the dozens of accused war criminals who have been brought to The Hague. His nominal superior, Radovan Karadzic, is conducting his own defense in a courtroom just one floor below, but is unable to summon much of an audience. The Mladic case is still in the technical, pre-trial phase, but the public gallery was packed, and the guards had to turn spectators away.

Karadzic cuts a buffoonish, inconsequential figure by comparison to the Bosnian Serb military commander. In Srebrenica, Mladic was able to determine who lived and who died with a wave of the very same finger that he now uses to summon his lawyers and wag angrily at the judge. When you are in his presence, you feel that you are as close as it is possible to get to the passions and hatreds that ignited "the tinderbox of Europe" yet again two decades ago. Understanding the personality and motivations of Ratko Mladic is key to understanding the first great crisis of the post-Cold War era.