Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, has died in prison, prompting BBC correspondent Allan Little to recall meeting him during the early Bosnian war. Little describes Mladić as intensely fanatical despite his claims to support peace and Yugoslav unity, and places that encounter against the widespread displacement, violence and ethnic cleansing that soon followed.

Mladić’s forces committed mass murder, expulsions, rape and other war crimes while pursuing ethnically Serbian territory, culminating in the genocide at Srebrenica in 1995. Little also recalls witnessing around 40,000 people fleeing a captured town and the killing of his 25-year-old cameraman, Tihomir Tunukovic, illustrating the war’s personal as well as historic cost.