The Sept. 7 funeral in Serbia’s capital Belgrade for Ratko Mladić, the imprisoned former commander of the Bosnian Serb Army – with thousands turning out to mourn his death — illustrates how the image of him as a Serbian military hero continues to compete with – and often displace – the judicially established record of his responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Mladić died in detention in The Hague on Aug. 27, almost nine years after the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted him in November 2017 of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes and sentenced him to life imprisonment, a judgment upheld on appeal in 2021. His convictions encompassed some of the gravest atrocities committed in Europe since the Second World War, most notably the Srebrenica genocide and the campaign of terror against civilians during the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo.
Indicted in 1995, Mladić nevertheless had evaded justice for almost 16 years before his arrest in Serbia in 2011, benefiting for significant periods from networks of protection linked to Serbian military and security structures. During his years as a fugitive, he was reportedly seen at family celebrations, football matches, and restaurants. Based on the reactions in Serbia and among ethnic Serbs in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina since his death, the loyalty and protection he enjoyed did not disappear with his arrest or conviction.
The “Butcher of Bosnia”
Mladić was one of the principal architects and military executors of the Serb campaign of “ethnic cleansing” during the Bosnian War that raged from 1991 to 1995. The term was essentially a euphemism for a systematic campaign of killing, persecution, detention, sexual violence, and forcible displacement of tens of thousands of Muslim men, women, and children, carried out in pursuit of the nationalist project of creating an ethnically homogeneous Serb territory in eastern Bosnia and, ultimately, realizing the vision of a Greater Serbia. The result was the deaths of 100,000 people in Bosnia, the rape or sexual abuse of an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 women and girls, and the displacement of 2.2 million people.
The dehumanization and cruelty that characterized Mladić’s crimes were starkly captured in his instructions to his forces to “target Muslim neighbourhoods” and “shell them until they are on the edge of madness;” to “burn their brains” and to obey him “as if [the orders were] given by God.”
The scale and brutality of the crimes earned Mladić the epithet the “Butcher of Bosnia.” In imposing a life sentence at the ICTY, presiding Judge Alphons Orie stated that Mladić’s crimes ranked “among the most heinous known to humankind.” The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights at the time described him as the “epitome of evil.”
The harrowing brutality of the campaign conducted by Bosnian Serb forces, and supported by the government of neighboring Serbia led by Slobodan Milosevic, also became evident in the widespread use of sexual violence. By 1992, international media were reporting extensively on the mass and systematic rape of women and girls in Bosnia and Herzegovina, predominantly Bosniak Muslims. In towns such as Foča and Višegrad, sexual violence was so pervasive that numerous locations became sites of detention, rape, and sexual abuse. Its scale and connection to ethnic cleansing contributed to the international pressure that led to the establishment of the ICTY, whose jurisprudence subsequently recognized rape and other forms of sexual violence as crimes against humanity and war crimes.
ICTY judgments and testimony documented victims ranging from girls as young as 12 to adult women and men. Although women and girls constituted the majority of documented victims, men were also subjected to sexual violence, particularly in detention, including forced sexual acts, genital mutilation, and public sexual humiliation.
These crimes were calculated to inflict suffering far beyond their immediate victims. Rape and sexual abuse were perpetrated in front of children, parents, spouses, neighbors, and fellow detainees, transforming violence against individual bodies into an assault on families and entire communities. Sexual violence thus became a means of terror, humiliation, persecution, and forcible displacement, attacking the social bonds of targeted communities and leaving consequences that endured long after the violence itself had ended.
Serb “Hero”
The announcement of Mladić’s death was followed almost immediately by public mourning and glorification across the majority Serb entity of Bosnia, known as Republika Srpska, and in neighboring Serbia. These have ranged from public gatherings and candle-lighting ceremonies to religious memorial services and banners celebrating him as a hero, commander, and symbol of the Serbian national struggle.
Hundreds gathered in majority Serb East Sarajevo to pay tribute to the convicted general. One participant declared: “We have lost the best man we have ever had in our history. He was our commander; he led us to victories for our Republika Srpska. Our enemies managed to destroy him and bury him in The Hague.”
In the eastern Bosnian city of Bijeljina, also part of Republika Srpska, candles were lit in his honor; at a football match in Banja Luka, supporters displayed a banner proclaiming “eternal glory” to Mladić; and, most strikingly, in Srebrenica itself – the site of the genocide for which he was convicted – a memorial service (parastos) was held in honor of “the General.”
Such expressions were not confined to spontaneous gatherings. Political leaders openly participated in Mladić’s glorification. Former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik hailed him as a “hero,” called on people to “pay tribute to the General” and described his death as a “murder,” suggesting that it resulted from an “organized approach intended to bring about a fatal outcome.” Next door, Serbia’s Minister of Justice, Nenad Vujić, announced that Mladić would be buried with the highest state and military honors, while President Aleksandar Vučić accused the Hague Tribunal of “uncivilized behavior” for refusing to allow him to spend his final days outside prison.
On Sept. 3, Mladić’s body was flown to Serbia aboard a government aircraft and accorded military honors upon arrival. Draped in the Serbian national flag, his coffin was carried from the plane by members of the Serbian Armed Forces.
Two days later, hundreds gathered at the state-owned Army House in Belgrade for an official commemoration attended by the aforementioned Serbian justice minister, the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Mladić’s family, and former military personnel. Outside, supporters gathered wearing T-shirts bearing Mladić’s image and the inscription “Serbian hero.”
Radan Ostojić, Republika Srpska’s Minister of Labor and Veterans’ and Disability Protection, described bidding farewell to Mladić as an “honor and privilege.” Ostojić portrayed Mladić’s post-war fate as suffering endured on behalf of “the entire Serb people” and a journey along “the path of Golgotha and suffering.” More revealingly, Ostojić said that what gave him hope for “the survival of the nation” (a reference to the ethnic group) was the way younger generations viewed Mladić and the events surrounding his death. Contrasting “written history,” which he claimed “anyone can write and erase as they please,” with the history “the Serb people carry in their hearts,” he insisted that Mladić’s memory would be preserved.
The state honors and official glorification provoked strong criticism from European Union officials. EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos cancelled a planned visit to Belgrade, describing the “glorification surrounding Mladić’s death” as “incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.” Serbia’s path toward EU membership, she stressed, requires “confronting the past, genuine reconciliation, and respecting the victims of war crimes.” Vučić dismissed her explanation as “extremely short, but stupid, as usual” insisting that Kos would not “lecture” him about “who are criminals and who are not.”
Beyond Glorification
On Sept. 6, during a major soccer match in Belgrade between two arch rival teams, supporters of one team displayed a giant image of Mladić alongside the words “Pravac Potočari” (“Direction Potočari”), while a minute of silence was observed in his honor. The phrase echoed Mladić’s own words as Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica in July 1995 and advanced toward Potočari, where thousands of Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) civilians had sought refuge. In the days that followed, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, including my maternal grandfather, were killed and their bodies concealed in mass graves – crimes repeatedly established by international courts as genocide.
The Mothers of Srebrenica organization condemned the display, stressing that its meaning could not be reduced to football fandom. “’Direction Potočari’ is not a football chant. It is a message of hatred, an invocation of genocide, and the glorification of the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić,” the association stated.
The Funeral
Outside the church where Mladić’s coffin lay in state for the Sept. 7 funeral, a large banner stretched across the street proclaimed: “Welcome, General, and thanks to your mother for giving birth to a hero, so that Serbdom’s glory may return.”
Serbian authorities insisted the funeral was a private rather than a state event, and Vučić, once an outspoken supporter of Mladić, did not attend. But other top officials did attend. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porfirije, led the funeral service, and the church, in its official announcement of the ceremony, described Mladić as “an Orthodox Christian and Serbian soldier.”
Obliteration of Memory
Renowned chronicler of the Bosnian War Peter Maass has called this the “obliteration of memory.” It goes beyond denying crimes or destroying their evidence to celebrating the crimes and glorifying their perpetrators.
In the process, survivors such as my family and I are left fighting to preserve the memory of those we lost. I was only six when horrific crimes began to be committed against the Bosniak population of my hometown, Višegrad, in eastern Bosnia. Although my family tried to protect me – and, at my own request, rarely spoke to me directly about the crimes – it was impossible to escape what had happened. Genocidal violence had so profoundly shattered our families and communities that it entered even ordinary conversations.
At family gatherings, the mention of relatives or former neighbors was repeatedly followed by accounts of unimaginable suffering: my paternal grandfather’s brother and his wife had been burned to death in the Pionirska (Pioneer) Street fire; a cousin’s daughter, son, and wife had been burned alive in the Bikavac fire. Others had been murdered, raped, tortured, disappeared, or expelled. The geography of the town I remembered from childhood had become inseparable from the geography of violence.
Even at such a young age, I was haunted by their suffering and by the fact of my own survival. Only many years later would I learn to describe some of what I felt as survivor’s guilt. For much of my adolescence and adult life, I found myself in an almost unbearable position: I could not bear to hear what had happened to the people of my hometown, yet I felt a constant need – and increasingly an obligation – to preserve their memory and the truth about the crimes committed against them.
I have learned that dehumanization – expressed perhaps most starkly in the celebration of crimes committed against a people – can, when left unchallenged, culminate in genocide. And neither justice nor truth can ever be taken for granted. Those who endured unimaginable suffering and loss have had to relive it through testimony, investigations, and trials, repeatedly confronting denial, silencing, and dehumanization simply to obtain some measure of justice and recognition – and to ensure that the people they lost, what was done to them, and the lives they once lived are not erased from memory.
Truth is not self-sustaining. It does not prevail simply because it is true. Justice does not erase what happened, and memory does not preserve itself. Truth and justice must be documented, defended, remembered, and passed on. We have to fight for them.
