Ratko Mladić: BBC correspondent on meeting dangerous fanatic early in Bosnian war

Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić, dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his actions during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, has died in prison.

BBC special correspondent Allan Little was there throughout the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, and met Mladić in the early months of the Bosnian war.

At night, you could watch the fires of ethnic cleansing across the landscape. The flames provided the only light under the night sky and the black valley would glimmer with flecks of orange.

You could watch the men of our village move about silently in the shadows of their homes, each armed with some ancient weapon salvaged from wars long ago and, like the fears and the suspicions and the distrusts, handed down through the generations.

One morning I watched a procession of men and women emerge from a forest. They had been driven from their homes two days earlier and had fled with what they could carry.

Most were on foot. Some were crammed into the back of ancient farm vehicles drawn by donkeys. There were perhaps 40,000 of them. Their home town had fallen to a Serb advance that had come without warning.

Among them, one man seemed close to collapse. He stopped to speak to us.

The whole town had fled, he said. He had become separated from his wife in the long trek to safety and was now worried that she had not made it. His pale, almost translucently white skin was stretched across the bones of his face like parchment. His forehead was livid blue from a fall.

I asked him how old he was. He said he was 80. “May I ask” I said, “are you a Croat or a Muslim?”

The memory of it shames me even now as I hear, in my mind, his answer echo down the years.

“I am,” he said, “a musician”.

Our convenient ethnic shorthand reduced them to Serbs, Croats and Muslims. But they were also musicians and scientists and doctors and plumbers and farmers and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and very often children.