By Benedetta Perilli
Clara Usón has dedicated a book to Ana, the general's daughter, who killed herself after discovering the crimes committed by her father.
Clara Usón spent all day yesterday receiving messages. Many people felt the need to write to the Spanish author after the death of Ratko Mladić, "as if he were part of the family," she says.
In 2013, after three years of research, Usón dedicated the book La figlia (The Daughter), published by Sellerio, to Ana, the second daughter of the "Bosnian butcher", who committed suicide in 1994, at the age of 23, after discovering her father's crimes.
"She shot herself with her father's favorite pistol, the one with which Mladic said he would celebrate the birth of his grandchildren. I believe that her death led him to the Srebrenica massacre: we know that the operation against the UN bases, a month after Ana's death, he called 'Stella' ('Star'), while he himself called Ana 'star'."
How does Mladic's death make you feel?
"I don't deny it, it made me feel good, because he was a really bad man. He died in prison. I don't believe in the death penalty and it's right that it ended like this."
Does his death close a chapter in Balkan history?
"No. Many people continue to consider him a hero. President Vučić and at least half of Serbs believe that he was judged unfairly. What happened then was a warning: as often happens in history, when the Balkans tremble, Europe should be worried.
"The ethnic cleansing carried out by Milosevic and Mladic, the rhetoric that Muslims are going to conquer us, everything that the far right says today, they were saying in the 1990s. They were the forerunners."
Who was Mladic?
"A monster, a dogmatist, a man full of contradictions. That's where my interest came from. Manichaeism has never convinced me, it's a fraud. People capable of the greatest atrocities may not be just pure evil.
He was rightly convicted of genocide: inside him lived the dogma of the homeland, of ethnic supremacy. But Mladic is also said to have been a good commander, a good husband, a good father.”
What happened after Anna's death?
"He and his daughter loved each other very much. Ana's suicide haunted Mladic throughout his life. In the more than 15 years he spent on the run, before his extradition, he visited her grave in Belgrade, well-protected by the Serbs.
He went so far as to believe that she had been killed by the police. He talked to people who claimed to predict the future, he did everything he could to avoid accepting that she had killed herself because of him and his crimes.
One of his wishes is to be buried in the Topčider cemetery in Belgrade, next to Anna. Of the thousands of people he killed, he mourned only one: his daughter.”
What do you have left of this story?
"A lot of frustration. Above all, because the disgusting dogma of nationalism, embodied by Mladic, has today become part of the mainstream and risks becoming the future of Europe, just as it is already the present of Israel."
"History teaches us nothing. The only lesson it seems to teach us is that we never learn anything from history."
