Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb Commander, goes on trial today, accused of crimes against humanity; most specifically his role in the 3 year siege of Sarajevo and the genocidal killings of at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July 1995.
Many people in Bosnia today will be thinking of people they lost and how their lives were irrevocably changed by the conflict. Think of them today. They were just ordinary people enjoying doing what we all do, visiting friends and relatives, laughing, falling in love, getting married, going to university, getting jobs, helping neighbours, having children, driving their siblings mad, not listening to their mothers. They didn't deserve what happened. They didn't deserve the mess that the country is still in. They do deserve to see the man responsible for orchestrating some of the worst atrocities on trial for what he did. But they would rather by far that it had never happened at all.
(for more on Ratko Mladic see last years post and particularly the comments Mladic, Caught at Last )