"Hundreds of Muslims were killed and many more were wounded. Many were driven berserk by the assault and eye-witness accounts described how people were so horrified that they committed suicide to avoid capture. Many who were captured or surrendered, among them the wounded, were summarily executed. One eyewitness described how more than 100 captive Muslim men, women and children were slowly slaughtered by a group of Serbian soldiers using knives. Witnesses also saw hundreds of Muslim men buried in bass graves, some buried alive."

"According to testimony of the few witnesses who survived, the men were the next day, on or about 14 July 1995, taken in trucks to at least two nearby fields and then shot where they stood. Mladic is placed at the scene of the killings by more than one survivor."

"As a result of the Bosnian Serb attack on Srebrenica, the Muslim population of the enclave was virtually eliminated. The two suspects are Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic." The judge concluded: "The evidence discloses, prima facie, the commission of crimes against humanity. The policy of 'ethnic cleansing' has genocidal characteristics."

More than two years have elapsed since the fall of Srebrenica, and despite the scale of the carnage, the veracity of shocking testimonies to it and the warrants for the arrest of Mladic and Karadzic, there has been no effort by the international community to capture them. Indeed, there has been extreme reluctance to do so, with western diplomats and politicians continuing to deal with them. Furthermore, there has been no blame attached tot he UN leaders and troops who delivered the men of Srebrenica to the slaughter or to the man who masterminded the bloody four-year war across former Yugoslavia, President Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia.

A remarkable set of documents obtained from inside the United Nations shows that Milosevic and the UN high command were acting as a close-knit cabal during the massacre at Srebrenica.

They were in constant touch with each other, even meeting in the Serbian capital of Belgrade to force "agreements" about the safety of their own soldiers and equipment while women were being raped and murdered, and the men of the town systematically shot and dynamited to death.

The UN Dutch battalion was even giving the Bosnian Serbs the fuel to drive the buses that brought the victims to the execution sites and the bulldozers which ploughed the corpses of their victims into the ground.

Before the fall of Srebrenica, a pivotal deal between the UN and Mladic had already been cast in stone. General Bernard Janvier of France, supreme United Nations military commander of former Yugoslavia and based in Zagreb, had met with Mladic at the Hotel Vidakovac in the town of Zvornik on the Bosnian-Serbian border on 4 June 1995.

The meeting took place at a time when the Bosnian Serbs held a number of UN soldiers hostage. The two men struck a deal: if the Serbs released the hostages, many of whom were French, and stopped shooting at UN troops, the UN would in return cease to grant permission for NATO air strikes against them.

"We were the supplicants," one of Janvier's aides said. "Janvier proposed the meeting. Janvier proposed the deal." It was the latest in a miserable litany of acquiescence and capitulation to the Serbs by the United Nations, among which was the setting up of the doomed safe areas themselves.

The three-point agreement drawn up between Janvier and Mladic said:

The UN hostages were, indeed, freed by the middle of June. But Janvier's bond with Mladic drew the wrath of his immediate inferior, General Rupert Smith, UK Unprofor commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo. There was a meeting at the Dalmatian port of Split in Croatia on 9 June, chaired by Yasushi Akashi, the UN secretary-general's special envoy to former Yugoslavia, to try to resolve the differences. Akashi himself had established a consistent record of stifling attempts at intervention against the Serbs, using his close contact with Belgrade to do so.

Smith observed: "We have been neutralized." He argued that "if we hit them, they [the Serbs] will be more co-operative". Janvier disagreed. "I insist we will never use force to impose our will on the Serbs, he said, admitting that "the Serbs are controlling the situation."

The strategy was that the UN should, rather than defy the Serbs, placate them by abandoning the safe areas to the mercy of the executioners. "What would be most acceptable to the Serbs, he said bluntly, "would be to leave the enclaves. It is the most realistic approach and it makes the most sense from the military point of view, but it is impossible for the international community to accept."

But he was wrong only on the last point. Such a betrayal was utterly acceptable to the international community. By striking a treacherous deal with Mladic, General Janvier, who represented the United Nations, had already condemned Srebrenica to the sword.

Bosnian Serb Troops began their final, bloody push into Srebrenica in the afternoon of 11 July 1995. The first official UN document to mark the offensive is a full record of a meeting held the "Blue Sword Crisis Action Team", the UN high command for the entire region, in Zagreb that day. The meeting was led by special envoy Akashi.

His senior military commander, General Janvier, was there, as was the chief of staff, brigadier General Steren, as well as the Nato liaison officer, British Air Commodore Rudd, and three other senior military officers.

The meeting started with the news that the Bosnian Serbs were attacking the Dutch UN battalion, and that Nato planes were "forming a strike package en route to Srebrenica." General Janvier's deal with Mladic seemed to be in trouble. But two minutes after this bulletin, Akashi told the meeting about a telephone call he had with Milosevic, who in theory, had nothing to do with the war since May 1992.

Akashi explained to Milosevic the difference between "close air support" for his UN soldiers and "air strikes" against the Serbs, apparently insisting that this Nato action was not an air strike and that the Janvier-Mladic deal was intact.

Milosevic replied on behalf of Mladic, saying that Mladic would not recognize the difference. At 2.40pm, Nato planes struck two targets, a tank and an armoured personnel carrier, missing the tank. Janvier then stepped in and ordered the Dutch soldiers to withdraw from their observation posts and retreat to the battalion compound at Potocari near Srebrenica.

Extraordinarily, the phone rang. Milosevic was on the line, apparently outraged by the timid air strike. Akashi explained that the Nato action was in response to an attack on his men and, that if the Serbs withdrew, there would be no more strikes.

Then, suddenly, Akashi started to talk to Milosevic about a Dutch soldier killed by the Bosnian army the previous week, saying he hoped these latest developments would not jeopardise the peace process.

The Bosnian Serbs were, by now, tearing into Srebrenica while Akashi was stating Milosevic's position to the meeting: that the Serbian troops were advancing only in response to "terrorism" by the Bosnians.

At 8.08pm that evening, the town taken and the slaughter under way, Akashi wrote to Kofi Annan, head of UN peacekeeping in New York, now UN secretary-general. For the first time, Akashi acknowledge that "Serbs harassed the column of Bosnians leaving Srebrenica for Potocari". There were "exploding shells so close to the column of the displaced" that they created "panic". What he referred to here was not panic; it was what Judge Riad called the massacres in the woods, the ambushing of civilians with shells and mortars as they fled the safe area declared by his own UN.

It has since emerged that even during the morning of the day Srebrenica fell, intelligence documents were reporting that Mladic intended to exterminate the entire population of the town. Two-thirds of the population of 40,000 had fled to the Dutch base at Potocari. The Dutch had been given orders from Unprofor "to protect the refugees" and escort them to "safe areas". The Serbs, however, insisted on the horrific separation of these people by sex in full view of the UN Dutch battalion commander and soldiers.

On 12 July, a column of between 12,000 and 14,000 able-bodied men and boys set off across the frontlines. More than half of them were ambushed or executed en route. During the days that followed, the rest were bused to a place of execution and summarily murdered. On the 12th, a letter form the Dutch commander on the ground, Colonel Ton Karremans, detailed two meetings he held with Mladic on 11 and 12 July. At the first meeting Mladic, "in a most threatening way", said he would use "all his assets" to "outgun" the Dutch compound if it continued to harbour refugees. At a second meeting, he demanded the removal of all Bosnian troops from the collapsed enclave. A debriefing by Dutch Brigadier General van der Wind, delivered in October that year to the Dutch government, told how Mladic set out his conditions for the evacuation of refugees. He insisted on the separation of women and children from the men. Karremans is reported to have "objected to the screening, but also to no avail; that is to say, the process of separation was not only accepted by the Dutch battalion but that they participated in the screening as early as 12 July.

The debriefing continued: "In order to prevent excesses with regard to transport, the battalion commander decided to co-operate in the evacuation. When the first buses arrived, they were stormed by a large number of refugees who wanted to board as quickly as possible. Dutchbat [Dutch battalion] personnel then formed an orderly pathway to the buses."

Next day, the 13th, General van der Wind's debriefing report states that "the transports were resumed at 06.30hrs". Extraordinarily, the report notes that "a list of men of fighting age was drawn up on the initiative of the deputy battalion commander [Major Franken.] This was done partly on the compound itself." Approximately 60 men refused to give their names. Ultimately, there were 239 names on the list. At approximately 19.30hrs on 13 July the last refugees left Potocari, with the exception of a few who stayed behind. In fact, these individuals were handed over by Dutchbat to the Bosnian Serbs -- they were never seen again.

The report notes that the "events which occurred from 6 to 13 July were particularly hectic, confusing, and disorganised" This was the official UN description of the carnage summarised in Judge Riad's chilling verdict.