Serbs, seen as defender of their dwindling fortunes..

In May 1992, Bosnia's Serbian political leaders picked him to head their forces and lead the assault on their enemies. Bosnia's Muslim leaders wanted independence while the Serbs wanted to remain part of Yugoslavia -- and the ethnic majority.

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Mladic wasted no time galvanizing his heavily armed forces to besiege Sarajevo, cutting the city off from the outside world by shelling and sniping at its poorly prepared civilian population in the valley below them. More than 10,000 people, most of them civilians, were killed.

Over the course of the three-year war that raged across the whole country more than a quarter million people died, making the conflictthe bloodiest in Europe since World War II.

A French policeman who collected evidence from Bosnian Muslims, Jean-Rene Ruez, told The Hague tribunal in 1996 that Bosnian Serb forces killed and tortured refugees in Srebrenica at will. Streets were littered with corpses, he said, and rivers were red with blood. Many people committed suicide to avoid having their noses, lips and ears chopped off, he said.

Among other lurid accounts of mass murder, Ruez cited cases of adults being forced to kill their children or watching as soldiers ended the young lives.

"One soldier approached a woman in the middle of a crowd," he said. "Her child was crying. The soldier asked why the child was crying and she explained that he was hungry. The soldier made a comment like, 'He