At the start of the trial of Bosnian Serb wartime military leader Ratko Mladic at the Hague-based UN tribunal on Wednesday, prosecutor Dermot Groome said in his opening statement that General Mladic's criminal intent was to ethnically cleanse non-Serbs from Bosnia and Herzegovina and to exterminate Bosnian Muslims and Croats from a great part of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina to which Serbs laid claim.
"The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes," he said.
The 11-count indictment charges Mladic with genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs and of war.
Mladic, who was arrested in Serbia last year after being on the run for 16 years, is accused of orchestrating the week-long massacre in Srebrenica, at the time a U.N. "safe haven", the years-long siege of Sarajevo, in which more than 10,000 people were killed by snipers, machineguns and heavy artillery and of the taking of UN peacekeeping personnel as hostages. He is charged with genocide his troops committed in Srebrenica and seven more Bosnian towns: Bratunac, Foca, Kljuc, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik.
The prosecutor said that as soon as he became the Bosnian Serb army on 12 May 1992, he began fully participating in a joint criminal enterprise that had already been launched.
With his appointment, Mladic assumed the task of accomplishing the criminal aim of ethnically cleansing a large part of Bosnia through the military way, according to the prosecutor.
Groome recalled that the Bosnian Serb assembly of 12 May 1992 had defined six strategic goals of the Bosnian Serbs, with the first and foremost goal being the separation of the Serbs from the Croats and the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This meant to radically change the ethnic structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Groome said.
In this context he spoke about the persecution and extermination of Muslims throughout Bosnia in 1992 and the killing of thousands of Muslim men and boys captured after Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Bosnian Serb troops under Mladic's command in 1995.
The prosecutor recalled the footage of the execution of Srebrenica men and boys in Trnovo and the shelling of the Markale market in Sarajevo in August 1995.
He recalled that in Trnovo the 16-year-old boy Dino Salihovic had been killed and that according to the crime video-taped by the notorious Scorpions members, his executors told him that he would die being innocent.
The 70-year-old Mladic arrived in the courtroom in a dark suit, and upon his entrance he flashed a thumbs-up and clapped his hands. With an impassive face, he was listening to the prosecution's statement.
Families of victims were also in the courtroom to attend the beginning of Mladic's trial.
During the trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, the prosecution is planning to hear 140 witnesses.
