Milan Martić
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) today handed over a 35 year jail sentence to Milan Martić, the paramilitary leader of the Croatian Serbs in the early '90s. To many of us the most important detail of the sentence has been the fact that the ICTY acknowledged the central role that the Serbian-led Yugoslav army played in the ethnic cleansing in Croatia, and thus confirms the central tenant of Croatia's understanding of that conflict as an act of aggression of one country on another, and not a civil war.
One of Martić's most heinous crimes was the indiscriminate shelling of the civilian populated downtown Zagreb in 1995. My mom and brother were there at the time, and I called home as soon as I found out about it. Fortunately, neither one of them was hurt, although one of the rockets hit close to where my brother had passed by a tram just a short while earlier. It was yet another one of the close brushes with the war we had, luckily it was also to be the last one.