THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2025 109 several more months to run. Ultimately, Sarajevo survived the siege, a deadly vise that lasted almost four years and claimed more than 10,000 lives. Srebrenica did not pull through. Mladić inflicted a catastrophic fate on the enclave. “The unimageable is taking place,” Silajdžić told me. The subject line of my July 11 cable was stark: “PM Silajdžić: Srebrenica Doomed, ‘Betrayal Complete.’” His notion of betrayal encompassed not only UNPROFOR (the “Protection Force,” how bitter in his eyes!) but Western policy in general. e In 2011 Mladić went on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, accused of multiple charges relating to both the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica. Determined to see him face justice, I visited The Hague courtroom and peered at the defendant through the thick plate of glass erected in front of the public gallery. My diary records the scene at the session: “Throughout he yawned, looked bored, stared at me and the spectators, chewed his vitamin pills, buried himself in note-writing and, several times, blurted out protests. These outbursts brought down the displeasure of the Judge, who eventually stopped the trial and ordered Mladic out.” In 2017 the court found him guilty on 10 charges, including the Srebrenica genocide. He is now serving a life sentence. As Richard Holbrooke wrote in his memoir of the Dayton negotiations, To End a War, the name of Srebrenica “would become part of the language of the horrors of modern war, alongside Lidice, Oradour, Babi Yar, and the Katyn Forest.” His historic diplomacy, which ultimately did end the war in 1995, had been galvanized by the genocidal killing in Srebrenica. n
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