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 garb, young men carrying the flags of Serbia and of Republika Srpska, football fans. Inside, the body of Ratko Mladić lay in state. His military officer’s cap and his sabre rested on the coffin, his medals were laid out on display, and men in fatigues stood at either side.
Later the coffin, draped in the national flag, was carried out to applause, and the procession moved to the Košutnjak graveyard with hundreds of football fans among it, young men holding banners bearing his image. A gun salute was fired and a military orchestra played. Serbian ministers attended, despite earlier assurances that no serving officials would be present. Brussels had warned against precisely 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 has also refused to recognise that genocide was committed at Srebrenica, describing the summary execution of thousands instead as a “horrific crime.” Days earlier, Red Star Belgrade fans had unfurled a large image of Mladić at a match in the capital, with a line referencing those executions, and 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 during the Bosnian War, was widely known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, and in 2017 was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 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 military officer with command responsibility, he was held responsible for both the siege of Sarajevo and 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 a further 25,000 to 30,000 Bosniak civilians were expelled, by VRS units under Mladić’s command. Across the territory the VRS controlled, the campaign against Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats included unlawful confinement, genocidal rape, torture, plunder, the shelling of civilians, the targeting of political leaders and intellectuals, and the destruction of homes, businesses and places of worship. Courts found that some of the physical perpetrators held the intent to destroy the protected groups.
The Dutch inquiry into the fall of the enclave records how narrow the arithmetic was in those days. Dutchbat officers set up blocking positions with instructions to prevent an escalation, to watch the VRS so that it could not advance around them, and to serve as a shield between the population and the Bosnian Serb forces; where the VRS did not fire directly at the positions, the Dutch officers concluded it would not fire on the population either, as long as they remained in between. They could give up the positions, they said, only if the Bosnian army abandoned the fight, if their armoured vehicles were threatened, or if the VRS went round them and no close air support arrived. If the town were attacked, B Company would try to move civilians out towards Potočari, which was still relatively quiet. Air power carried its own price: after NATO struck Pale on 25 and 26 May 1995, the Bosnian Serbs took hundreds of UN personnel hostage, and experience had taught that such reprisals paralysed UNPROFOR for two to 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 against targets 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 for the remarks the following day, calling them idiotic, irresponsible and emotional, and said he had told Mladić in hard terms that he had no authority to speak that way. Mladić’s deputy, General Milan Gvero, promptly added a threat of his own, warning that unless Muslims, Croats and Serbs were separated for good, the killing in Bosnia would go on for a hundred years.
That summer the maps were being drawn in Geneva. In late June 1993 Karadžić announced, after five hours of talks with the Bosnian Croat leader Boban, that they had agreed on a confederation of three republics with a joint council of ministers, without agreeing on the actual division of territory; the EC mediator Owen called the announcement premature and said the two men would need far more precise ideas to make progress. In August, Karadžić was made a knight of an order of Saint Dionysios of Zakynthos for his work for peace, the insignia pinned on him by a Serbian-American named Mladen Zarubica. Nobody could establish what the order was. The Serbian and Greek patriarchates both said they had nothing to do with it, the Greek and Romanian embassies in Belgrade were equally in the dark, and the Belgrade paper Borba summed it up in a headline about an unknown order from an unknown church, while Politika noted that the honour placed Karadžić in the company of John F. Kennedy, Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer.
Mladić was indicted on 24 July 1995 and remained free for nearly sixteen years, sheltered first by Serbian and Bosnian Serb security services and later by his family. Biljana Plavšić dismissed him from his post in November 1996; he drew a pension until November 2005. Serbian officials said the last known footage of him dated 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 collect a state pension and sell his property; he was then hiding in a house his 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, without any particular reason to believe he was inside. He was about to set out on an early morning walk. He identified himself and handed over two handguns. His arrest was considered one of the preconditions for Serbia’s progress towards the European Union, and it improved relations with a bloc that had suspected Belgrade of sheltering him.
In Skopje, the writer Bardhyl Jashari, who runs the Metamorphosis Foundation, published an argument at the end of August, in the year North Macedonia marks 35 years of independence, that death changes nothing about the verdict: Mladić 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 multiethnic country and compromise 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 went on in public. Serbs gathered in towns across Republika Srpska, war veterans and government officials among them; 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 it, condemned the gathering at Zvornik and observed 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”.