Home · World · Sep 8 archive
Serbs Mourn 'Butcher of Bosnia' Ratko Mladic at Funeral in Belgrade
Confirmed
In Short: Thousands gathered in Serbia's capital to pay respects to the convicted war criminal, despite international condemnation.
Thousands gathered in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, to attend the funeral of Ratko Mladic, the convicted war criminal who commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the Bosnian War. The event, widely attended by Serbs and Bosnian Serbs, sparked international condemnation, with the EU and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa expressing shock at the turnout.
‘Anyone glorifying Mladic is approving mass murder of thousands of innocent people,’ said a spokesperson for Al Jazeera, highlighting the controversy surrounding the funeral. The EU condemned Mladic, stating, 'Ratko Mladić was a convicted war criminal who had committed war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
‘Thousands attended the funeral because he remains a figure of national pride and defiance,’ said Daniella Peled, Editor at the Institute of War and Peace Reporting NGO, who covered Mladić's war crimes trial in detail. A priest blessed the coffin of the late Bosnian Serb military leader, and men wearing flags as capes, with the picture of Mladić, stood among the crowd in Belgrade.
During the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, his troops committed what became known as 'ethnic cleansing' in Bosnia-Herzegovina in a bid to expel the non-Serbian population by force. Serbia’s Justice Minister Nenad Vujic joined Mladic's family at the burial, further fueling international criticism.
What's confirmed
What's still developing
- In 1998, I found myself, as a UN employee, prosecuting Bosnian Croats and a Bosnian Serb for dreadful crimes against Bosnian Muslims and from 2002, prosecuting Slobodan Milosevic for all he did in the wars against Croats, Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Kosovars.
- As the former Yugoslavia started to break up, some Serbs and Bosnian Serbs were encouraged to believe that Serbia’s entitlement to hegemony of the Western Balkans could justify what Mladic was doing.
- For Mladic’s mourners to justify his actions with the desire to control the Western Balkans or even simply to have all Serbs in a single state achieved by murderous ethnic cleansing of areas that had no Serb majority is as bad as killing someone in the street for a packet of sweets.
- Putin’s war was never justified, but he has no qualms about feeding hundreds of thousands of his own people into killing machines to kill blameless Ukrainians.
- Widely known as the Butcher of Bosnia, Mladić died at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence in the UN prison in The Hague, the Netherlands.