Mladic Conviction Closes Dark Chapter in Europe, but New Era of Uncertainty Looms<br />Sead Numanovic, a Bosnian journalist in Sarajevo who fought against Mr. Mladic’s forces, said, “This verdict, like all<br />the others, will not bring back sons to their mothers, dead brothers to their sisters and husbands to their wives.”<br />The sense of victimhood among Serbs seemed to have been trumped on Wednesday by the sentencing of Mr. Mladic, which all but confirmed Bosnian Muslim resentments<br />that the Serbs had succeeded in advancing their territorial ambitions by genocide.<br />“Regardless of the verdict that we all feel as part of the campaign against Serbs, Ratko Mladic remains a legend of the Serb nation,” said Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb autonomous region in Bosnia<br />and Herzegovina, which was carved out and cleansed of non-Serbs by Mr. Mladic’s wartime forces.<br />Commenting on the outcome of the trial in The Hague, Natasa Kandic, a leading Serbian human rights activist, said<br />that with the atrocities in the Bosnian war, “we stopped being part of the civilized world.”<br />“Now we can see who stopped our progress and why we became a society without solidarity or compassion,” Ms. Kandic said.<br />With applause inside and outside the courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Gen. Ratko<br />Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb commander, was convicted on Wednesday of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
