Again, I write about something bleak and dark. I have a BBC news app on my Kindle Fire and a headline about Ratko Mladic came across. Mladic is presently on trial at The Hague. The trial was halted in May because of "irregularities" by the prosecution, but the first witness has now taken the stand in the war crimes trial of the former Bosnian Serb army chief.

Elvedin Pasic held back tears as he described fleeing his village under fire and returning to find elderly neighbours burned in their homes. He told the international tribunal at The Hague how Bosnia's ethnic groups lived in peaceful coexistence until the outbreak of war in the 1990s.
Gen Mladic is charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity under Slobodan Milosevic (Yugoslavia/ Bosnian War 1992-99) which resulted in the deaths of roughly 100,000 men, women, and children. Survivors recount gruesome treatment, ruthless executions and brutal rapes. The 70-year-old ex-army chief denies the charges.He was on the run for 16 years before his arrest and is one of the last key figures wanted for war crimes during the Bosnian War. He was captured in 2011.

I don't remember hearing about this in US news, and after catching this on BBC, I did a search for related news stories and most appear to be British broadcasts and newspapers. Clinton sent US troops as part of a UN effort to stop the genocide. Do we care so little now just because the victims of this atrocity were Muslims?



A much older and sickly Mladic is on trial. Some of the relatives of victims and survivors of the war have expressed concern that if the trial takes too long, Gen Mladic, who has suffered from heart problems, will die before a verdict is reached.