Ratko Mladic, nicknamed “the Butcher of Bosnia,” joins a who’s who of accused genocidal dictators, warlords and mass murderers at the international war crimes detention center in The Hague.
Set in a leafy suburb, the Scheveningen detention center is already home to the former Bosnian Serb military leader’s one-time political partner, Radovan Karadzic, currently on trial.
Other inmates include former Liberian president Charles Taylor, charged with committing murder, rape and sexual slavery as he sought control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines or “blood diamonds,” and Thomas Lubanga, the Congo warlord charged with recruiting child soldiers.
Mladic, indicted by an international war crimes tribunal over the killing of 10,000 civilians during the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and for the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992 to 1995 Bosnian War, arrived in The Hague late on Tuesday.
Scheveningen’s international complex, housing those awaiting trial for the International Criminal Court (ICC) as well as the Yugoslav and Sierra Leone tribunals, is built next to an old prison where Dutch resistance fighters were imprisoned by the Nazis.
Compared to the prisons in the inmates’ home countries, the detention center seems relatively luxurious.
For a start, there’s the location. This is prime real estate, about 2km from the beach where top properties have views of rolling sand dunes and the whiff of sea spray.
Then there are the facilities: detainees are locked in their cells — single, not shared, and about 10m2 in size — from 9pm to 7:30am, where they can watch television, read or work on their cases.
Each cell in the ICC wing contains a bed, desk, bookshelves, a cupboard, toilet, hand basin and a telephone, although calls are placed by the center’s staff. Detainees can work on their cases using computers but cannot access e-mail or the Internet.
During the day, they are free to mingle and instead of wearing prison uniforms can dress in their own clothes.
However, in the Yugoslavia wing of the detention unit, politics and court cases are taboo topics of conversation, perhaps to stop the discussions from getting too heated.
“There are strict rules in the detention center — conversations about politics and cases are not allowed,” said Sefer Halilovic, a former Bosnian Muslim general who was suspected of murder of Croat civilians during 1992 to 1995, but later acquitted by the tribunal.
Serbian media reported that despite their political differences, detainees who used to be on opposite sides in the 1992 to 1995 war in the Balkans would gather for religious holidays and even exchange presents with one another.
“The war separated us and The Hague has put us together again,” Halilovic wrote in a book about his time in detention.
Others also noted the camaraderie that developed in the detention center.
According to former Macedonian interior minister Ljube Boskovski, who was also acquitted by the tribunal, when Ante Gotovina arrived in The Hague, he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt because he had been arrested in the Canary Islands.
“The problem was resolved when [former Serbian strongman] Slobodan Milosevic lent him a pullover,” Boskovski was quoted as saying.
Gotovina was se-ntenced to 24 years for war crimes against Serbs in Croatia.
With political and legal discussions off-limits, small talk tends to center on food, family and health issues, such as the difficulty of getting access to the local dentist.
One of the most common complaints is the food: The vegetables served al dente are not to everyone’s taste, but detainees can request items from a shopping list and prepare their own food.
“The food is not what we are used to in the Balkans. Vegetables are not cooked well enough and portions are too small so we had to buy our food in the canteen,” Halilovic said
However, his main complaint was the difficulty of getting a dentist appointment because there was only one dentist and a long waiting list. Mladic, whose lawyers have argued that he is in poor health, is very likely to have access to good medical treatment, because the war crimes tribunal will not want another top war crimes suspect to die in detention in The Hague.
Milosevic, who liked to listen to Celine Dion CDs in his cell, died in detention on March 11, 2006, a few months before a verdict in his four-year trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The center is located in a prison compound which houses a prison hospital and psychiatric clinic. Common criminals are housed there only if they are undergoing medical treatment, a Dutch Justice Ministry spokesman said.
Despite all the facilities, Halilovic said, “It is still a prison.”
There is much evidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is sending soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to support Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and is learning lessons for a future war against Taiwan. Until now, the CCP has claimed that they have not sent PLA personnel to support Russian aggression. On 18 April, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinskiy announced that the CCP is supplying war supplies such as gunpowder, artillery, and weapons subcomponents to Russia. When Zelinskiy announced on 9 April that the Ukrainian Army had captured two Chinese nationals fighting with Russians on the front line with details
Within Taiwan’s education system exists a long-standing and deep-rooted culture of falsification. In the past month, a large number of “ghost signatures” — signatures using the names of deceased people — appeared on recall petitions submitted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) against Democratic Progressive Party legislators Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) and Wu Pei-yi (吳沛憶). An investigation revealed a high degree of overlap between the deceased signatories and the KMT’s membership roster. It also showed that documents had been forged. However, that culture of cheating and fabrication did not just appear out of thin air — it is linked to the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), joined by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), held a protest on Saturday on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei. They were essentially standing for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which is anxious about the mass recall campaign against KMT legislators. President William Lai (賴清德) said that if the opposition parties truly wanted to fight dictatorship, they should do so in Tiananmen Square — and at the very least, refrain from groveling to Chinese officials during their visits to China, alluding to meetings between KMT members and Chinese authorities. Now that China has been defined as a foreign hostile force,
On April 19, former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) gave a public speech, his first in about 17 years. During the address at the Ketagalan Institute in Taipei, Chen’s words were vague and his tone was sour. He said that democracy should not be used as an echo chamber for a single politician, that people must be tolerant of other views, that the president should not act as a dictator and that the judiciary should not get involved in politics. He then went on to say that others with different opinions should not be criticized as “XX fellow travelers,” in reference to