Opponent of ethnic cleansing: General Ratko Mladic

On 12th May 1992, as the Bosnian civil war was just beginning, the Bosnian Serb Assembly voted to create a Bosnian Serb army, and appointed General Ratko Mladic, then Commander of the Yugoslav People's Army district covering Bosnia, as its head. At that time the Assembly was full of discussion about what the goals of the Serbs should be in the coming conflict, and it was on that same day that Radovan Karadzic, President of the Serb Democratic Party, presented their six strategic goals to the Assembly. On this matter, Mladic had this to say:

"People and peoples are not pawns, nor are they keys in one's pocket that can be shifted from here and there. It is something easily said but difficult to achieve. We cannot cleanse, nor can we have a sieve to sift so that the only Serbs would stay, or that the Serbs would fall through and the rest leave… People, that would be genocide… We cannot wage war on all fronts nor against peoples. I would like to suggest that we adopt such a wisdom that we will not go to war but that if we are attacked, we will defend ourselves, and we don't want a war against the Muslims as a people or against the Croats as a people but against those who started that war and who pitted these people against us.”

Does this sound like something that a genocidal monster who, as the BBC puts it, "came to symbolise the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims", would say?

NOTE: A proper article will come soon, I have posted this because of Mladic's current reappearance in the news.