On Monday morning, thousands of people came to a church in Belgrade. The church is the Serb Orthodox Church of St Luke. The body of Ratko Mladić was inside the church. His army cap was on the coffin. His sabre, a long sword, was on the coffin too. His medals were next to him. Men in army clothes stood on both sides. Old soldiers came. Young men came with flags. Football fans came too.
Then men carried the coffin out. People clapped. A flag was on the coffin. The people walked to the Košutnjak graveyard. Soldiers fired guns. An army orchestra played music. Ministers of the Serbian government came. The EU said before that this was wrong. The EU said people must not say good things about war criminals.
Who was this man? Ratko Mladić was born on 12 March 1942. He died on 27 August 2026. He was 84 years old. He died in prison in The Hague. He was in prison for all his life. He was the head of the army of Republika Srpska in the Bosnian War. In 2017 a court said he was guilty. People called him the “Butcher of Bosnia”.
In July 1995, soldiers killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica.
Ćamil Duraković is the vice president of Republika Srpska. Before, he was the mayor of Srebrenica. He was in Srebrenica in 1995, and he lived. He said Mladić lived many more years than his victims. He said this made him very sad, because thousands of other people did not get an old age.