BELGRADE/THE HAGUE – Ratko Mladić, the former commander of the Army of Republika Srpska during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995, has died at the age of 84 in a UN detention facility in The Hague. Belgrade-based Informer TV reported his death. Mladić was serving a life sentence in The Hague for war crimes and genocide.
Mladić was one of the most prominent and controversial figures of the Bosnian War. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) prosecuted him for, among other things, genocide, persecution, terrorism, unlawful attacks on civilians, and hostage-taking. After years on the run, Mladić was arrested in Serbia in 2011 and subsequently extradited to The Hague. The trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ended in 2017 with a verdict finding him guilty on ten counts of charges and sentencing him to life imprisonment.
One of the most serious aspects of the verdict was his responsibility for the events in Srebrenica in July 1995, where thousands of Bosnian men and boys were murdered. The tribunal also found him responsible for other crimes committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mladić's defense team appealed the verdict. However, in 2021, the Appeals Chamber of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals upheld the verdict and maintained the life sentence. His health condition repeatedly became a subject of attention over the years. The defense repeatedly requested his release or a change in the conditions of his imprisonment, but these requests were denied by the judicial authorities.
A figure that still resonates in Serbia
Opinions about Ratko Mladić are becoming increasingly uniform in Serbia. Most of the public considers him a symbol of the military leadership of Bosnian Serbs and remembers his role during the war, but there are also some dissenting opinions. His portraits and slogans supporting Mladić have appeared in the streets of Belgrade and other Serbian cities in the past, and they are appearing more and more frequently. For part of the Serbian public and some Bosnian Serbs, his conviction remains a symbol of what they consider to be a one-sided, biased, hypocritical, and above all unfair approach by international justice to the war in the former Yugoslavia.
This segment of society has consistently rejected the verdict against Mladić as unjust and claims that crimes committed against Serbs were not taken into account when assessing the war. With the death of Ratko Mladić, the life of one of the most prominent figures of the Bosnian War ends, whose assessment remains a subject of political and historical unanswered questions more than thirty years after the breakup of Yugoslavia.