Ratko Mladic, the ‘butcher of Srebrenica’, has died

Ratko Mladic, also known as ‘the Butcher of the Balkans’, died today at the United Nations detention centre in The Hague. He was the former commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska (the Serb-majority entity in Bosnia) and had been sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was 84 years old. The news, initially reported by media outlets in the region, has also been confirmed by the Serbian public broadcaster ‘RTS’.

Mladic had served as Chief of Staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1995 and had led the Bosnian Serb forces during some of the war’s major operations. In November 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced him to life imprisonment, finding him guilty on ten of the eleven charges brought against him. According to the judgement, Mladic, who was commander of the Bosnian Serb army at the time, had carried out a deadly campaign of shelling and sniper fire, including against civilians, and in Srebrenica had committed genocide, persecution, extermination, murder and inhumane acts through forced transfers. The judge had to remove him from the courtroom after he flew into a rage against the court. The decision was definitively upheld on appeal in June 2021 by the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. Among the crimes for which he was convicted were the genocide of over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995, the persecution, murder and deportation of the civilian population, the campaign of terror against Sarajevo during the siege of the city, and the taking of United Nations personnel hostage. After the war, Mladić remained a fugitive for almost 16 years, until his arrest on 26 May 2011 in the village of Lazarevo, near Zrenjanin in Serbia, and his subsequent extradition to The Hague.

In recent years, his health had progressively deteriorated: he suffered from serious cardiovascular and neurological conditions and had suffered several strokes. Since 2024, he had been receiving palliative care at the detention centre’s hospital. In recent weeks, his family and the Serbian authorities had stepped up their requests to allow him to spend the final stage of his life in Serbia. On 22 August, however, the Hague Mechanism had rejected a further application for early release on humanitarian grounds, noting that the imminence of death did not in itself constitute sufficient grounds for release and maintaining that Mladic was receiving adequate medical and palliative care in the Netherlands. 

Despite his conviction, in parts of Serbia and the Republika Srpska he has continued over the years to be celebrated as a military commander and a symbolic figure of the Bosnian Serb cause. On a wall in one of the streets in the centre of Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, a huge mural of Mladić is prominently displayed, alongside the words "General, thank your mother for bringing you into the world". The mural has become a battleground between those who would like to remove it and far-right activists who (with the connivance of the police, who are theoretically there to prevent unrest) carefully guard the mural.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić stated in recent days that he did not understand the "inhuman principles" that led the Residual Mechanism for the International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague to refuse to allow the transfer to Serbia of Mladic, who is now on his deathbed. Returning him to Serbia so that he might die there as a martyr would have carried a symbolic cost that the Mechanism was not prepared to pay.