From early on Monday morning, they came through the doors of the Serb Orthodox Church of St Luke in Belgrade in their thousands: former soldiers in military uniform, young men carrying flags of Serbia and of Republika Srpska, football fans. Inside, the body of Ratko Mladić lay in state. His officer’s cap and his sabre rested on the coffin, and his medals were laid out on display. Men in combat uniform stood on either side.
Later the coffin, wrapped in the national flag, was carried out to applause, and the procession moved to the Košutnjak graveyard, with hundreds of football fans among it and young men holding banners showing his face. A gun salute was fired and a military orchestra played. Serbian ministers attended, although the government had promised earlier that no serving officials would be there. 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, and it still refuses to accept that genocide was committed at Srebrenica, calling the killing of thousands of people a “horrific crime” instead. A few days before the funeral, Red Star Belgrade fans had unfurled a huge image of Mladić at a match in the capital, together with a line referring to those killings, and had chanted his name.
The man in the coffin was born on 12 March 1942 and died on 27 August 2026, aged 84, while serving a life sentence in The Hague. He had commanded the Army of Republika Srpska, the VRS, during the Bosnian War, and was widely known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”. In 2017 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him on ten counts: one of genocide, five of crimes against humanity and four of violations of the laws or customs of war. As a senior officer who gave the orders, he was held responsible both 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”.
What that verdict covered is a matter of record. In July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed at Srebrenica, and another 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak civilians were driven out, by VRS units under Mladić’s command. Across the areas the VRS controlled, the campaign against Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats included unlawful imprisonment, rape, torture, looting, the shelling of civilians, attacks on political leaders and intellectuals, and the destruction of homes, businesses and places of worship. Courts found that some of the men who carried out these acts intended to destroy the groups they attacked.
The Dutch inquiry into the fall of Srebrenica shows how narrow the calculations were in those days. Dutch soldiers set up positions designed to stop the fighting from getting worse, to watch the VRS so that it could not advance around them, and to act as a shield between the population and the Bosnian Serb forces. Where the VRS did not fire at these positions, the Dutch officers concluded that it would not fire on civilians either, as long as their own men stayed in between. Air power came at a price: after NATO struck Pale on 25 and 26 May 1995, the Bosnian Serbs took hundreds of UN staff hostage, and experience had shown that such acts of revenge left the UN force unable to act for between two and six weeks.
Two years earlier, the general’s threats had already reached far beyond Bosnia. In May 1993, Mladić said that if the West intervened militarily against the Bosnian Serbs, it should expect bombings in Western capitals: there were, he said, plenty of furious Serbs in London and Washington who could do a great deal of damage with a single match, and any foreign force in Bosnia would leave its bones there. Radovan Karadžić apologised the next day, calling the remarks idiotic, irresponsible and emotional, and said he had told Mladić in strong terms that he had no right to speak that way. Mladić’s deputy, General Milan Gvero, immediately added a threat of his own, warning that unless Muslims, Croats and Serbs were separated for good, the killing in Bosnia would continue for a hundred years.
Mladić was indicted on 24 July 1995 and remained free for almost sixteen years, protected first by Serbian and Bosnian Serb security services and later by his own family. Biljana Plavšić removed him from his post in November 1996, yet he drew a pension until November 2005. Serbian officials said the last known film of him came from military barracks near Valjevo on 1 June 2002. In June 2010 his family asked a court to declare him dead, which would have allowed his wife to claim a state pension and sell his property; at the time he was hiding in a house the family owned. That October the reward for his capture was raised from five million euros to ten. On 26 May 2011, two dozen masked officers went to check a relative’s house in Lazarevo, in northern Serbia, with no particular reason to believe he was inside. He was about to leave for an early morning walk. He gave his name and handed over two handguns. His arrest was seen as one of the conditions for Serbia’s progress towards the European Union, and it improved relations with a bloc that had long suspected Belgrade of hiding him.
In Skopje, the writer Bardhyl Jashari, who runs the Metamorphosis Foundation, published an argument at the end of August, in the year when North Macedonia marks 35 years of independence, that death changes nothing about the verdict. Mladić, he wrote, was neither a war hero nor a victim of The Hague, and when officials put a convicted war criminal on a pedestal they insult the victims, weaken the rule of law, damage the idea of a country of many ethnic groups and harm its European ambitions. A state, he wrote, is not built by glorifying war criminals. North Macedonia has been an EU candidate since 2005, having applied the year before.
Elsewhere the mourning continued in public. Serbs gathered in towns across Republika Srpska, among them 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, a former mayor of Srebrenica and a survivor of the massacre, condemned the gathering at Zvornik and pointed out that Mladić had outlived his victims by decades. “More than anything,” he said, “we feel the bitterness that he lived to such an advanced age while thousands of others, unfortunately, did not”.