The slogan under which he has led his people is 'Brotherhood and Unity,' no one nationality greater than the other. He is the great leader of Yugoslavia, who liberated his people from the Nazis, who guided a middle way between the West and the Soviet Union. His picture sits above the blackboard in school houses all across the country, smiling down with benevolence. Tito is like a grandfather to Ana, to all children. Her father sits on the other side of her brother, Darko, who squirms while watching the procession. Beside Ana, her mother hangs her head and cries, blowing her nose on a handkerchief. Ana is nine her family watches the funeral on the television screen, the procession of his coffin, the lines and lines of state dignitaries who attend. She looks up and smiles at his broad face how much she loves him. She imagines she can disappear into her father's chest, that it is a cocoon enveloping her. When Ana comes home, he pulls her into a crushing embrace. Yugoslavia, he vows, will never forget his name. He has proved himself to be good at leadership, at war making. Her father is finishing his military training in the Yugoslav People's Army, recently promoted to lieutenant. She wonders if that is something that other people realize. She has a mind that is ravenous, that seeks to consume everything it is offered. In school she sits quietly, absorbing every word. She wears a uniform, a pleated skirt, her socks come up to her knees. She walks from the apartment block where she lives with her family in Skopje to school. Her mother has taught her to be polite, to cross her legs when she sits, to ask nicely for things she wants. Īna grows to be intelligent, kind, and quiet, with pretty dark hair cut like a bowl. He vows he will never disappear for Ana, as his father has disappeared for him. Ratko's father died when he was three years old, leading an attack against the Croatian fascist Ustaše in World War II. Ratko leans down, draws the hair out of his wife's face, and takes Ana from her. I imagine their lives, imagine Ana's mother's face drawn and white as she holds Ana in her arms. Her family has left Serbia for Skopje, where her father is stationed with the Yugoslav National Army. She is their second child, their only girl. Her father is a platoon commander, her mother, Bosa, a housewife. In 1971, Ana is born in in Skopje, which will later become the capital of North Macedonia. Men, after all, have a way of swallowing the stories of the women in their lives. Ratko firmly denies all of the charges.īut today, we will not speak of Ratko. No one had been tried for such crimes since the Nuremberg trials in 1946. In 2017, he was found guilty of war crimes on one count of genocide and nine counts of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and sentenced to life in prison.

Of the great despots of the twentieth century, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Ratko ranks among them. You may not have heard of Ana, but you have probably heard of her father, Ratko, former commander of the Serbian army in Bosnia, who was responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre during the Yugoslav Wars. She found it in her father's study, in a cupboard in the Belgrade apartment where her parents lived. O n march 24, 1994, at the age of twenty-three, Ana Mladić shot herself in the head with one of her father's pistols.

Force mass acceleration