Mladic wary then defiant in dramatic Hague debut

Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic faced the UN war crimes tribunal on Friday as a defiant general who never lost a battle, denying the charges against him as "obnoxious" and "monstrous". Formally charged by a UN tribunal which has waited 16 years to see him in the dock, he began with a wary appeal from a "very sick man" but ended with a defiant flourish of his old bravado, predicting he would be acquitted.
"The whole world knows who I am. I am General Ratko Mladic," he said at the end of his first appearance, a tense 100 minutes. "I defended my people, my country ... now I am defending myself," he told the court and rapt public gallery. "I just have to say that I want to live to see myself a free man."
Sitting in the same chair as political chiefs Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, co-accused in a conspiracy to carve a Great Serbia from the wreckage of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, Mladic began by greeting the court with a salute. He said he was in poor health and needed more time to study the indictments against him. But by the end of the session, the general in this lifetime soldier had reasserted itself. He told Judge Alphons Orie indignantly he did not want to hear "a single letter or word of that indictment" read out.
As expected, Mladic declined to enter a plea, and Orie set his next hearing for July 4. Mladic shook his head in denial as Orie, reading a summary, described the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, of which his second-in-command, Radislav Krstic, was convicted of in April 2004. "He showed no remorse, he mocked the court," said Ramiza Gurdic whose two sons and husband were killed by Mladic forces.
"It took him only three days to kill thousands of our loved ones and now he says he needs two months to read the indictment," she said, watching Mladic on Bosnia television. Once an intimidating figure on the battlefield, Mladic now looks his 69 years. His mouth drooped slightly at one corner and his speech sounded slurred, the possible result of a stroke.
Dressed in a gray striped suit with a gray shirt and sober black checked tie, he frequently wiped his cheeks and mouth, stroked his chin and placed his hand on his forehead. He listened intently to Orie, nodding or shaking a finger.