Ratko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, given hero’s funeral in Serbia

Original article by Ana Milosavljevic in Belgrade and Oliver Holmes

Ratko Mladić, a Serbian general convicted of orchestrating the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war, has been given a hero’s funeral attended by thousands in Belgrade despite international alarm.

Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for ​his role during the Balkans genocide in the 1990s, Mladić died in prison in late August aged 84 while serving a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Mladić was found guilty of genocide in 2017 for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed after Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-designated enclave.

But he has remained a beloved figure among many Serbs, with the president, Aleksandar Vučić, arguing last month for him to be released early from a UN detention facility in The Hague so he could die on Serbian soil.

Vučić, an ultranationalist leader, has dominated Serbian politics for more than a decade and is due to run again for prime minister in a snap election announced on Monday.

Mladić’s coffin was flown to Serbia last week on a government plane, draped in national flags and carried from the aircraft by uniformed soldiers.

On Monday morning, thousands of people gathered in front of a small church in the Serbian capital to pay their respects to Mladić. Armed forces stood guard at his casket, on top of which was laid his signature military cap, as well as a sword. A display of medals lay in front.

“We know that his name will remain deeply etched in the memory and prayers of the majority of our Serbian Orthodox people, who feel and nurture a deep sense of gratitude towards him,” said Porfirije, the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox church.

After the service, a street procession moved with the coffin towards the cemetery, where Mladić was buried with military honours including a three-volley rifle firing salute.

Scenes of military pomp drew condemnation from the European Union’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, who cancelled a forthcoming visit to Serbia on Friday. “The return of his remains to Belgrade reminds Europe of the darkest pages in our recent history,” she said on social media.

Serbia has been negotiating EU accession since 2014, but the process has stalled in recent years.

“The glorification surrounding [Mladić’s] death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built,” said Kos. “That path requires confronting the past, genuine reconciliation and respecting the victims of war crimes.”

An EU spokesperson repeated the warning on Monday. “Any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries,” he said in a statement.

On Sunday evening, ​football fans displayed a huge image of Mladić and chanted his name at a match in Belgrade.

While Monday’s ceremony was not an official state funeral – probably to avoid further damaging international relations – it mirrored a state event, with large police and military delegations. Vučić said he had a prior engagement, but his son Danilo attended along with several other Serbian ministers, as well as Russia’s ambassador to the country.

During the early 1990s Balkans conflict, when Mladić was a military officer, Vučić was entering politics as part of the Serbian Radical party, a far-right nationalist party that sought to secure land for a “Greater Serbia” by removing non-Serb populations.

Decades later, Vučić has managed to remain in office – once as prime minister and twice as president over 12 years – while vacillating between keeping close ties with Russia and seeking EU membership. But anti-government anger was galvanised after the 2024 collapse of a railway station roof that killed 16 people, with widespread claims of corruption threatening his hold on power.

On Monday, Serbia’s government said it intends to ⁠dissolve parliament and set a date for a snap election, a year ahead of a planned December 2027 vote. The current prime minister, Djuro ‌Macut, said: “If we want to mitigate tensions in society there ‌is no better way than to ask people.”

The election has been seen as a chance for Vučić, who cannot legally run for president for a third term, to stay in high office, and his ruling party has nominated him for prime minister.

Marko Vujić, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade, said he did not believe the government had planned the snap election announcement to coincide with Mladić’s funeral. “But once his death occurred, the regime took advantage of the momentum surrounding the event and used that day, among other things, for the dissolution of parliament.”

Mladić was one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war, which killed more than 100,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.

Key among his crimes was the 1,460-day siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, where the civilian population was subjected to daily shelling and sniper attacks from Serb nationalist forces, and more than 10,000 people were killed.

The three-year conflict culminated in the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Bosniak Muslims in the town of Srebrenica, a crime that shocked governments in Europe that had spent decades working to prevent mass killings after the mid-century horrors when Nazi Germany killed 6 million Jews.

In Srebrenica, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children and promising their safe passage before thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed, and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves. “We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladić said at the time in filmed comments.

The killings have been pointed to as an international failure, especially as Srebrenica had been designated a “safe haven” under the protection of the UN, a global body created immediately after the second world war specifically to help prevent such bloody future global conflicts.

Mladić was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years as a fugitive, and sentenced by a UN tribunal in the Netherlands to life imprisonment in 2017.

While in detention, Mladić had been in ill health after having a series of strokes.

The Balkan war started after the June 1991 breakup of Yugoslavia, when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Bosnian Serbs quickly took control of more than two-thirds of Bosnia and launched the siege of Sarajevo. After three years of bloodshed, the Dayton agreement was signed in Dayton, Ohio, ending the war and creating the independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

• Agence France-Presse contributed to this report