In the spring of 1995, General Rupert Smith who at that time was the commander of the UN Protection Force in Bosnia, began to warn that the Bosnian Serbs would soon try to take back zones that had been declared "safe" by the United Nations.
Many didn't take his warning seriously.
The on July 11, 1995, a massacre took place in a small salt-mining town called Srebrenica.
Ratko Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serb army that entered the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 and was accused of orchestrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Over the next five days, over 7,000 men and boys were executed, by machine-gun in groups of 10. A bulldozer was used to cover the mass graves. Right before the violence started, Mladic was seen laughing with his soldiers, handing out candy, telling civilians not to worry.
Srebrenica is the worst massacre to have taken place in Europe since the Second World War at the hands of the Nazis. And the dead were slaughtered simply for being Muslim. The massacre was only a small part of the over 100,000 who would be killed during the war, the majority of whom were Muslim.
A month later, after a mortar attack on a Sarajevo market, NATO bombed the Serbs for two weeks, and the Serbs quickly surrendered. The Clinton administration assigned Richard Holbrooke to bring the warring groups together and negotiate a peace.
After the war ended in 1995, Mladic went on the run, with considerable help from his family and others. Mladic evaded capture for 16 years, until May 26, 2011 when police came to a simple yellow brick house in the village of Lazarevo, north of Belgrade.
Dressed in black, the masked officers surrounded the house. Inside, Mladic was preparing to go for a walk in the garden. He surrendered without a fight and was extradited for trial in the Netherlands.
Ratko Mladic was charged with two counts of genocide and nine crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, during which 100,000 people were killed and another 2.2 million displaced.
The trial, which opened in 2012, took place at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands. The ad hoc court was established to prosecute crimes committed during the Balkans conflict.
Mladic was found not guilty on one charge of genocide, but received a guilty verdict on each of the other 10 counts and sentenced to life in prison. His judgment day came over a year after Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in prison for his role in the 1990s conflict.
