Mladic, wearing a suit and tie, gave a thumbs-up and clapped to supporters in the court’s public gallery as the trial got under way Wednesday. He occasionally wrote notes and showed no emotion as prosecutors began outlining his alleged crimes.

Munira Subasic, who lost 22 family members in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, was among a group of relatives of war dead heading into the courtroom to face Mladic.

The 65-year-old said she wanted to look him in the eye “and ask him if he will repent for what he did.”

Presiding Judge Alphons Orie of the Netherlands said at the outset that the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start May 29, due to “errors” by prosecutors in disclosing evidence to the defense. Prosecutor Dermot Groome said he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment.”

Groome began his opening statement by focusing on the plight of a 14-year-old boy whose father and uncle were among 150 men murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in November 1992.

He said Mladic’s forces continued such killings through to 1995, when they massacred some 8,000 Muslim men in the Srebrenica enclave, the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II.

“By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica … they were well-rehearsed in the craft of murder,” Groome told the court.

He then showed judges video of the aftermath of a notorious shelling of a market in Markale, in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, that killed dozens of people.

He said all the attacks were part of an “overarching” plan to ethnically cleanse parts of Bosnia of non-Serbs.

Prosecutors will show evidence “beyond reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said.

Mladic has refused to enter pleas, but he denies wrongdoing, saying he acted to defend Serbs in Bosnia. If he is convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

He suffered a stroke while in hiding and has had other health problems since arriving in The Hague. He now looks little like the burly, swaggering general who marshaled his troops as the world watched during the Bosnian war.

His trial opened as the case against his former political master, Radovan Karadzic, has reached its halfway stage at the same court. Both men face virtually identical 11-count indictments alleging they masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted together 17 years ago, but their cases were split when Karadzic was captured in Serbia in 2008 and transferred to The Hague. It was another three years before Mladic was finally arrested in a village near Belgrade, ending 15 years as one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives.

Izudin Alic, a Muslim boy made famous in 1995 by images of Mladic patting his face and handing him chocolate, said he wants swift justice after waiting for so long. He planned to watch the opening of the trial on television.

“Just like everyone else, I want him to be tried and sentenced as fast as possible. I hope that the trial will not drag on,” he said as he visited his father’s grave in Potocari, near Srebrenica. “I want him to be sentenced as soon as possible.”

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Sabina Niksic in Srebrenica contributed to this report.

Tribunal President, Judge Theodor Meron, rejected the appeal, saying in a written ruling he was “not satisfied that Mladic has demonstrated that a reasonable observer, properly informed, would reasonably apprehend bias.”

Mladic also filed a motion late Monday seeking a six-month delay in the start of his case, arguing that prosecution lawyers had not properly disclosed all evidence to his defense team.

“This filing is made urgently due to the impending trial start date and the injustice and undue prejudice that would result to our client, Mr. Mladic, arising out of the late disclosure of materials if forced to proceed to trial,” the motion said.

The court has not yet ruled on the motion.

Mladic faces 11 charges, including two counts of genocide, alleging that he orchestrated atrocities by Serb fighters throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

He has refused to enter pleas but denies wrongdoing. He faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.

The frail former general was arrested last year in Serbia after 15 years as a fugitive. He is the last major player from the Bosnian conflict to go on trial at the U.N. court.

“Victims have waited nearly two decades to see Ratko Mladic in the dock,” said Param-Preet Singh, senior counsel in the International Justice Program at Human Rights Watch. “His trial should lay to rest the notion that those accused of atrocity crimes can run out the clock on justice.”

“It’s a very elaborate, well done water color and that’s quite extraordinary in this period of Van Gogh’s oeuvre,” said Marije Vellekoop, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. “Out of the blue, in the summer, in July, he makes a series of water colors … with a lot of detail, but also very painterly, fluent.”

The willow trunk droops over the water and a path wends its way to the horizon, where a windmill stands near a railroad depot.

Not unusually for a Dutch summer, gray clouds dominate the sky, but Van Gogh also captured the occasional splash of deep blue as the clouds broke. The sky was almost identical Thursday morning — low gray clouds scudding over the landmark Amsterdam museum — as director Axel Rueger revealed the painting to the media.

Rueger said the painting, bought at auction in London earlier this year for €1.5 million ($1.9 million), filled a gap in the museum’s collection of Van Gogh works.

“What’s so special is it is for the first time a rather substantial work that he executes in color,” Rueger told The Associated Press. “It comes from a very small group of works he makes at the time and we didn’t have anything like that in our collection.”

For now, it will hang at the Van Gogh Museum. Later this year it and dozens of other paintings will be shifted across the Amstel River to the Hermitage Amsterdam while the Van Gogh Museum closes for several months for renovations.

Van Gogh wrote enthusiastically to Theo a few days after completing the painting, and included a sketch. The letter, on faded brown paper, hangs next to the completed painting in the museum. In it, Van Gogh says he considers the willow the best of a series of water colors he painted that summer.

“I think he was very happy with the result and he was also confident that he could also work with color,” said Vellekoop.

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It is not the first time Zegveld has represented widows and children of alleged massacres in Indonesia. Last year, she won a landmark case that prompted the government to apologize and compensate a group of widows.

Zegveld cited a Dutch commission of inquiry that in 1954 concluded that Dutch authorities “adopted the way of extra-statutory trial and execution” to stamp out the rebellion.

The full report of the commission was not immediately available. However, Dutch media have reported on such killings before.

No Dutch troops have ever been prosecuted in any of the alleged massacres, Zegveld said.

The foreign ministry confirmed it had received Zegveld’s letter and said in a statement it was studying the claim.

In her letter, Zegveld alleges that one of the massacres took place in the village of Galung Lombok on Feb. 1, 1947. The letter claims that Dutch forces entered the village in the morning, ordered residents from their homes and then torched the houses before executing 364 people.

One of Zegveld’s clients, Asia Sitti, was the daughter of the village elder and witnessed the killings. Sitti was 12 years old when her father was shot in front of her, Zegveld claimed.

In another village, Bulukumba, Zegveld alleged that up to 250 men were executed in January 1947, some shot while fleeing through rice fields, others while standing in front of a pit dug by villagers.

“The people were shot from behind so they fell into the hole,” according to Zegveld’s letter. “Most of them were farmers or fishermen.”

Monday’s demand comes months after Zegveld successfully sued the Dutch state in a similar case — a massacre on Indonesia’s main island of Java, also during the independence war.

In that case, a court in The Hague ruled that Dutch forces were responsible for summarily executing up to 430 men in the village of Rawagedeh. After the judgment, Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal formally apologized to the relatives and agreed to pay compensation to widows.

Rosenthal said last year that the apology “does justice to the gravity of what happened in Rawagedeh.”

Former Foreign Minister Ben Bot expressed deep regret for offenses by Dutch forces throughout Indonesia in 1947, but the government had never previously formally apologized to relatives in Rawagedeh.

Zegveld said that following the landmark Rawagedeh judgment, she now wants to sit down with Foreign Ministry officials to work out a plan for addressing similar cases.

“I see no reason to go to court. We can all predict what the court will say,” she told The Associated Press.

The pass will roll out in the rest of the country — including Amsterdam — next year. It will turn coffee shops into private clubs with membership open only to Dutch residents and limited to 2,000 per shop.

The changes are the most significant rollback in years to the traditional Dutch tolerance of marijuana use.

In a written ruling, the court agreed with government lawyer Eric Daalder that the fight against criminality linked to the drug trade justified the measure.

“This is a totally political judgment,” said Maurice Veldman, one of the team of lawyers who represented coffee shop owners in the case. “The judge completely fails to answer the principal question: Can you discriminate against foreigners when there is no public order issue at stake?”

Veldman said he would appeal, but added it was unlikely he could do so before the new policy comes into force May 1.

The government argues that the move is justified as a way of cracking down on so-called “drug tourists,” effectively couriers who drive over the border from neighboring Belgium and Germany to buy large amounts of marijuana and take it home to resell.

The tourists cause traffic and public order problems in towns and cities along the Dutch border.

However, such problems are virtually nonexistent in Amsterdam where the small, smoke-filled coffee shops are visited by thousands of tourists each year — mostly youngsters who consider smoking a joint to be part of the essential Amsterdam experience alongside visiting cultural highlights like the Van Gogh museum and the canals.

The conservative Dutch government introduced the new measures saying it wants to return shops back to what they were originally intended to be: small local stores selling to local people.

The government had no immediate reaction to Friday’s ruling.

Coffee shop owners in the southern city of Maastricht have said they plan to disregard the new measures, forcing the government to prosecute one of them in a test case.

Though the weed pass policy was designed to resolve traffic problems facing southern cities, later studies have predicted that the result of the system would be a return to street dealing and an increase in petty crime — which was the reason for the introduction of the tolerance policy in the 1970s in the first place.

The cities of Tilburg, Breda and Maastricht have now said they oppose the pass system, though Eindhoven plans to move ahead with it and the eastern city of Dordrecht wants to adopt it in anticipation of an influx of foreign buyers — even though it is not yet required to do so.