BBC correspondent recalls meeting Mladić as 'dangerously fanatical' during Bosnian war

Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander known as the Butcher of Bosnia, died in prison. BBC special correspondent Allan Little was embedded throughout the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and in the summer of 1992, during the opening months of the Bosnian war, he met Mladić face to face.

What Little witnessed in those early weeks was the machinery of ethnic cleansing in motion. At night, fires lit the landscape where villages burned. Men moved through shadows armed with salvaged weapons, fear and suspicion passed down like heirlooms. One morning, a procession emerged from the forest—perhaps 40,000 people, driven from their homes two days earlier, crammed into farm carts pulled by donkeys or walking on foot. Their town had fallen without warning to a Serb advance. Among them was an elderly man, his skin translucent, his forehead bruised from a fall. He had become separated from his wife during the flight. When Little asked whether he was Croat or Muslim, the man answered: "I am a musician." The question itself was a reduction, a flattening of human complexity into ethnic categories. But they were also scientists and doctors and plumbers and farmers and mothers and fathers and children.

Little met Mladić at Lukavica barracks on the southern edge of Sarajevo. The compound was thick with weapons and the swagger of paramilitaries. A Kalashnikov sold for $200. A hand grenade cost a dollar—the same price, Little would learn, as a fresh egg in the besieged city. When Mladić shook his hand, he held it long and pulled Little close. He had just returned from the front line near Sarajevo's city center, and the proximity to combat had left him visibly energized. He spoke of defending brotherhood and unity in the former Yugoslavia, of dreaming of a world without guns or war. But what struck Little was the fanaticism beneath the words—a dangerous, unblinking certainty.

In the years that followed, forces under Mladić's command would commit the worst war crimes on European soil since the Second World War. They introduced a new term to the vocabulary of conflict: ethnic cleansing. They carried out mass murder, extermination, mass rape, forced expulsions. Village after village burned in the pursuit of ethnically pure Serbian territory. At Srebrenica, they committed genocide.

Two days after Little encountered the old musician on that muddy roadside, the war became personal. Tihomir Tunukovic, Little's cameraman, a man he had worked alongside for eighteen months, was killed by a Serb gunner firing from a ridge above the road where Tunukovic was driving. He was twenty-five years old, a talented and ambitious filmmaker from Zagreb. They had parted that morning. They drove his body back along rutted mountain paths to Split and broke their hearts at his funeral. The grief connected them to the war's own logic—the cycle of vengeance and counter-vengeance that defined what they were witnessing. Mladić did not pull the trigger, but his command created an atmosphere of permissiveness that would cost tens of thousands of lives.