Early on Monday morning, thousands of people came through the doors of the Serb Orthodox Church of St Luke in Belgrade. Among them were former soldiers in uniform, young men carrying flags of Serbia and of Republika Srpska, and football fans. Inside the church, the body of Ratko Mladić lay in state. His military cap and his sabre, a long curved sword, rested on the coffin, and his medals were laid out on display. Men in military clothes stood on each side.
Later the coffin, covered with the national flag, was carried out while people applauded. The procession moved to the Košutnjak graveyard, with hundreds of football fans walking in it and young men holding banners with his image. There was a gun salute, and a military orchestra played. Serbian ministers came too, although the government had promised earlier that no serving officials would attend. Brussels had warned against exactly this. Any glorification of convicted war criminals, the EU said, “has no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries.” Serbia’s government continues to reject such warnings. It also refuses to accept that genocide was committed at Srebrenica, and calls the killing of thousands of people a “horrific crime” instead. A few days before the funeral, fans of Red Star Belgrade had shown a large picture of Mladić at a match in the capital and chanted his name.
The man in the coffin was born on 12 March 1942 and died on 27 August 2026, at the age of 84, while he was serving a life sentence in The Hague. During the Bosnian War he commanded the Army of Republika Srpska, and many people called him the “Butcher of Bosnia”. In 2017 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found him guilty on ten counts: one of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. Because he was a senior officer who gave the orders, he was held responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and for the Srebrenica massacre. After the verdict, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the former UN human rights commissioner, called him the “epitome of evil”.
In July 1995, soldiers under his command killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica and forced another 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak civilians to leave. In the areas his army controlled, the campaign against Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats also included torture, rape, plunder, the shelling of civilians and the destruction of homes, businesses and places of worship.
Mladić was indicted on 24 July 1995, but he stayed free for almost sixteen years, protected first by Serbian and Bosnian Serb security services and later by his family. In October 2010 the reward for his capture was raised from five million euros to ten million. On 26 May 2011 two dozen masked officers went to check a relative’s house in Lazarevo, in northern Serbia, without any special reason to believe he was there. He was getting ready for an early morning walk. He told them who he was and handed over two handguns. His arrest was seen as one of the conditions for Serbia’s progress towards the European Union.
At the end of August, the writer Bardhyl Jashari, who runs the Metamorphosis Foundation in Skopje, argued that Mladić’s death changes nothing about the verdict. Mladić, he wrote, was neither a war hero nor a victim of The Hague, and when officials treat a convicted war criminal as a hero they insult the victims and damage their country’s European ambitions. A state is not built by glorifying war criminals.
Serbs also gathered in towns across Republika Srpska, including war veterans and government officials. Milorad Dodik called the death a “murder” and praised Mladić as a “commander and he stood to defend Serbs.” Ćamil Duraković, the vice president of Republika Srpska, who was once mayor of Srebrenica and survived the massacre, condemned the gathering in Zvornik and said that Mladić had lived decades longer than his victims. “More than anything,” he said, “we feel the bitterness that he lived to such an advanced age while thousands of others, unfortunately, did not”.