Survivors' groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina condemned Serbia's announcement that it will bury Ratko Mladić with the highest military and state honors. Mladić, the commander of the Bosnian Serb army during the early 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia, died on August 27 in custody in The Hague. He had been imprisoned since his 2017 conviction by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The ICTY found Mladić responsible for widespread atrocities by his forces, including the 1995 mass execution of at least 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica. Mladić was arrested in 2011, after 16 years evading capture, and his trial was the last before the ICTY closed in 2017. The tribunal had indicted 161 people for serious violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia; all faced justice or died.
The tribunal's legal record contrasts with the political reception of its verdicts in parts of the region. In Serbia and the Republika Srpska — the predominantly Serb entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina — political leaders and others deny crimes by Serbian and Bosnian Serb forces and lionize some ICTY convicts, according to the source material. The United Nations special adviser on prevention of genocide has warned of increasing genocide denial in the Balkans.
The EU pressed Serbia to cooperate with the ICTY as a condition of EU membership negotiations, a role that facilitated Mladić's apprehension. National trials of lower-level suspects continue, but observers assess they are unlikely to end disagreement over the region's wartime history.
