A man who died serving a life sentence for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes could be buried with the highest state honours. Serbian Justice Minister Nenad Vujić announced them almost immediately after the death of Ratko Mladić. Aleksandar Vučić first claimed that there were no official notifications and that everything depends on the wishes of the family, then he accused the Hague Court of "uncivilized behavior" and said that it is now clear that the Hague wanted Mladić to die behind bars.
That double address is not new. For the international public, Serbia waits for the procedure and respects the family's decision, while for the domestic public, a well-known drive has already been launched that makes a legally convicted war criminal a martyr, his prison death a "murder in The Hague", and anyone who reminds of Srebrenica, the siege of Sarajevo or members of the United Nations tied to poles - enemies of their own people.
For days, tabloids count tweets and statements, single out anyone who did not agree to the mandatory national mourning and point the finger at peace activists, journalists and public figures. The atmosphere once again smells of a time when it was enough to call for peace and become a traitor. The public, after three decades of getting used to the lie, accepts the claim that Mladic was killed as it once accepted that Slobodan Milošević was killed in The Hague. The lie is no longer proven - it is enough to serve the alleged higher national goal.
Ratko Mladić did not become a burden to the Serbian people because he was convicted for his crimes as an individual. It has become a burden because political and media elites have been convincing Serbs to accept it as part of their identity for thirty years. The Hague Tribunal individualized his guilt. Serbia, glorifying him, re-collectivized it.
photo: ap photoPICTURES FROM LIFE: Commander of the VRS,...
HOW THE GENERAL WAS PRODUCED
The young man was not born as a national myth. His halo was systematically built by political centers, television stations and newspapers in Belgrade and Pale, since the beginning of the wars. A journalist who worked for foreign media in the 1990s, reported from the battlefields of the former Yugoslavia, knew Mladić and interviewed him several times, speaks to "Vreme" on condition of anonymity.
At the beginning of the conflict, he explains, Mladić won battles against unprepared and weaker opponents, so he quickly earned the halo of a man who wins. Compared to the drunken, bearded paramilitary commanders and local strongmen, he appeared as a disciplined officer who knows what he wants. He was everywhere: in the trenches, on the line, among the fighters. He was photographed eating cold cuts with the soldiers, and the soldiers love it when the general visits them and shares what they have with them.
When the JNA formally announced its withdrawal from Bosnia and Herzegovina in May 1992, Mladić, with the logistics and help of Belgrade, established a centralized command over the Army of Republika Srpska. According to our interlocutor, he introduced a certain order among the formations, which were often composed of local warlords, reduced arbitrariness and looting of Serbian villages. Such an image suited the population tired of chaos, but also Belgrade, which, in the midst of wars and sanctions, desperately needed a winner.
"He was a JNA brat who became a Serbian general overnight and made an officer's whistle", says our interlocutor. In public, he did not appear to be part of the corrupt Palja leadership. He did not show off his money, his family lived like a typical officer's family, and his conflict with Radovan Karadzic and Momcilo Krajisnik was perceived by many as a rebellion of soldiers against war profiteers. The people, says the reporter, did not need a politician but an archetypal protector.
Such Mladić was planned on RTS and RTRS, in "Večernji novosti" and "Politica", in propaganda centers in Pale and in Knin. Socialists and radicals, as well as parts of the national opposition, participated in the construction of the myth. Later, a partisan father, a child from Kalinovik, a family tragedy and hiding were added to it, presented as a continuation of the struggle for Serbia. The media did not just overlook his crimes: they translated crimes into victories, supremacy over civilians into heroism, and command responsibility into sacrifice for the people.
Such a need was not only Serbian. Each warring community chose its own commanders and made them protectors, suppressing everything that spoiled the national image. But in Serbia, Mladic became more than a Bosnian Serb wartime commander. He became a substitute for a victory that was not there and a proof that the country, although defeated, impoverished and isolated, still has someone before whom others fear. That is why the facts about the crimes did not destroy the myth. In his internal logic, the very fear he produced was proof of his strength.
The same system did not declare general Vladimir Trifunović, who pulled his soldiers out of the besieged barracks in Varaždin, a hero. He was tried for treason. Mladić became a hero precisely because the public was offered to enjoy a war that it was not ready to lead on television. People in Serbia, says the anonymous reporter, did not want to "put their asses on the grid", but they liked to watch the general prove their strength with other people's lives.
photo: ap photo…arrested,…
FROM THE PENTECOST TO THE COCKARD
Ljubodrag Stojadinović knew Mladić before he became a myth. A sociologist, military analyst and former colonel, Stojadinović was dismissed from the army in 1995, instead of being promoted to the rank of general, because he publicly spoke his mind. He met Mladić back in 1974, when Stojadinović was serving in Skopje and Mladić commanded a battalion in Kumanovo.
"He seemed like an energetic officer, but as a man whose achievements under normal circumstances would hardly have gone beyond the regimental commander. He followed the line of command and did everything that is expected of an officer who wants to advance. That is why his biography should be carefully examined: what drove him to become what he became?" Stojadinović told "Vreme".
He also sees a change in military costume design. In Knin, the young man first took off his cockades, and then ended up with a cockade and a cockade on his own head. "He had to identify with the army he leads. His transformation is also reflected in that costume design, from the pentagram to the cockade," says Stojadinović.
In the beginning, he had a huge advantage: weapons, logistics and officer experience from the JNA. But his opponents also learned over time, while the Army of Republika Srpska was divided into local groups and commanders who did their own thing. Mladic's authority and his real military power weakened as the war progressed, although the media myth grew.
Along with the myth of the winner, his feeling of almost divine power also developed. Stojadinović remembers telling the soldiers: "God can't do anything to you, but I can." Tying the members of the UN to the pillars was a means of blackmail, a demonstration that the general can also dispose of international hostages. "From such messages begins the myth of Ratko Mladić, who after so much time leads the Serbian army to a historic victory. Everything turned out to be an illusion and a delusion."
Stojadinović says that even he, when he met him, could not have imagined what that officer would turn into. People don't have to look like criminals before they become part of the system that makes crime possible. "In the army, you know what the profession of an officer is. An officer is not an ordinary warrior picked up from a village and eager for revenge. He is part of the system of responsibility, he is at the head of it and he is obliged to prevent crimes, not to encourage them or tacitly approve them."
In Sarajevo in 1992, he recalls, the hatred could almost be physically felt. In such an environment, Mladić did not reach for rationality and the rules of the profession, but for the conviction that he was protecting the people and that war glory belonged to him. There is a line between an officer who adheres to ethics and a commander who puts his power above it.
For Stojadinović, Mladić's sentence from Srebrenica that the time has come to "take revenge on the Turks in this area" is key. In the notebooks of the generals he studied, he found no explicit written order to kill, but command responsibility does not begin and end with a signed document.
"When you say in front of the cameras that it is time for revenge, you have given a signal for a crime. As an officer, Mladić had to know military ethics. Duke Živojin Mišić told the officers that they must protect prisoners more than their own soldiers. It is easy to kill a bound man and show strength over bound people. That is not heroism," says Stojadinović.
When he wrote in "Politica" about the video in which Scorpion members kill bound young men, one reader told him: "If the people who did it are Serbs, then I'm not a Serb." Stojadinović sees in that sentence the essence of resistance to the collectivization of guilt.
"There were crimes on all sides, but we are talking about crimes committed in our name. I do not agree to that. Mladić did not commit them in my name or in the name of all Serbs, but in the name of his own beliefs and delusions. If we identify with the people who committed such crimes, then something is dangerously wrong with us."
photo: ap photo...Hague indictee
SHADOWS OVER TOPČIDER
Mladić's myth was not only maintained by propaganda. In order for the accused of genocide to evade justice for sixteen years, a network of jailers, officers and service members who saw him as their general and not a fugitive was needed. It is known that he used military facilities until 2002. After that, he hid in apartments and houses, with the help of people who supplied him, secured him and warned him.
And Stojadinović admits that at one point, while Mladić was on the run, he instinctively stood somewhat on the side of the persecuted man "who doesn't like them". He later changed his mind: "He was obliged to go and report himself, as men less responsible than himself had done. He never understood that he had to bear the burden of his own guilt."
To what extent the system that protected him remained closed, the case of Topchider shows perhaps most chillingly. Symbolically, on October 5, 2004, on the fourth anniversary of the October 5th changes, guardsmen Dragan Jakovljević and Dražen Milovanović were killed in the secret military facility "Karaš".
The military investigation tried to explain their deaths as murder and suicide. An independent state commission ruled out that version and concluded that they were killed by a third person. This finding was supported by the subsequent expertise of the FBI laboratory and the American pathologist. The scene was compromised, the weapon was sent for ballistics before biological traces and fingerprints were taken, and part of the possible evidence was lost forever. The Constitutional Court of Serbia later found a violation of the right to life, and in 2025, Serbia undertook to conduct a new investigation before the European Court of Human Rights.
It has never been proven that the guardsmen were killed because they saw Mladic or members of his security in "Karas". But for more than two decades, the state has not discovered the killer, nor has it conducted an investigation that would confirm or reliably remove that suspicion. Topčider is therefore not proof that Mladić was in the underground complex. He is proof that political power could become democratic while parts of the military and security system remained beyond its control and capable of imposing a forensically unsustainable story about the death of two young soldiers.
WHEN FICTION BECOME TREASON
A myth survives not only because of those who produce it. He also needs a system of punishing people who refuse to obey him. For the nationalist myth, artistic fiction is sometimes more dangerous than a court document: a document offers facts and figures, and art gives a face to the victim.
In Berlin in 1930, Nazi SA squads disrupted screenings of an anti-war film Nothing new in the west, threw stink bombs and let white mice into the cinema. The violence they organized themselves then served as a reason for the Weimar State to ban the film. In Serbia in 2012, SA detachments were not needed in the hall. The tabloid campaign and threats were enough for the Belgrade premiere of the film In the Land of Blood and Honey Angelina Jolie will not be held.
Nikola Đuričko played a role in the film, but in Serbia he was treated as if he participated in writing the indictment against the people. He reached second place on the list of one hundred "anti-Serbs". At one court hearing, the judge asked him if he felt anti-Serb. Đuričko responded by asking if the anti-Serb is something like an anti-particle that collides with a particle and creates an explosion. In the end, the judge concluded that the actor does not feel anti-Serbian.
The absurdity of the question did not negate the consequences. Đuričko received bomb threats, later his children were told at school that their father was anti-Serb, and he still receives threats and insults today. The people who attacked him mostly didn't even watch the movie. It was enough that he accepted to play in a story in which the war in Bosnia was not portrayed as an epic defense of the Serbs.
The attacks hit a country that had a democratic government at the time, but that government failed to ensure that the Belgrade premiere was held or to defend its own artists from the label of national betrayal. The film, which was fiction, was treated as a hostile political document, and the actors had to explain that they were not the ones putting people in trucks, locking them in camps and shooting them - they were making the film.
Đuričko also spoke earlier about the practical damage that such an atmosphere caused to Serbia. Angelina Jolie refused to attend the Belgrade premiere due to threats and hostility, and according to what Đuričko found out at the time, the attitude towards her led Brad Pitt to abandon the planned film productions in Serbia. The message of his testimony is clear: in order to preserve the taboo about the war, Serbia was harming its own culture, film industry and international reputation.
A similar pattern existed before the wars. Žarko Laušević violently interrupted the play Saint Sava and later marked the threats that followed as the beginning of a spiral of fear that would profoundly change his life. The message to artists remained the same: it is permissible to play war, nation and history only if the prescribed image of us as victims only is not disturbed.
photo: masina.rs...
LIVE HOSTAGES
The deepest consequence of the thirty-year refusal to look in the mirror is not only seen in the generation that waged or supported the wars. It can be seen in young people who were not born then, and today they paint murals with Mladić's image and repeat the language of radical and socialist ideologues from 1992. This is not their memory. It is the result of a systematically produced memory: textbooks that blur the facts, media that turn defeats into victories, and politicians that declare every condemnation of a crime an attack on Serbs.
There is no place in that picture even for ordinary soldiers who believed they were defending their homes, lost an arm or a leg and returned to a society that forgot them. Their personal sufferings were not suitable for myth: they reminded us of the cost of war. The "invincible" general was more needed, because only such a figure could turn the defeat into a story of moral victory and free the politicians who produced the war from responsibility for its consequences.
"A framework of values has been created in which our criminals are better than theirs, and our victims are greater than theirs," says Stojadinović. "The public is inclined to declare great defeats as victories. Every absolutist appeals to the people, not to the citizens. I do not consider the rational idea that Mladic saved the Serbian people. What he did contributed to the suffering of Serbs and others."
Photo: Yoshida Masanori/FonetEARLY WORKS, CURRENT PROBLEMS: A. Vučić
It was the individualization of guilt that offered Serbia a way out. The verdict did not attribute Mladic's crimes to the Serbs. She named the man, his command responsibility and the crimes for which he was convicted. The political and media elites chose the opposite: to hide behind the people and present the judgment of one general as the judgment of all. Because if Mladić is left alone, the issue of ideology, propaganda, war profiteers and the system that produced and protected him must be opened.
"Condemning the crime is the way to move on with a clean slate," says Stojadinović. "We must create a civilized society that does not tolerate the glorification of crime. When we get rid of the fact that someone committed a crime in the name of the nation, we will step out of prehistoric and uncivilized society."
That is why the announced state honors are not just a matter of protocol at the funeral. They are a message to the living to accept Mladić as their representative, to bear his shame as their own and to experience every established fact as a national insult.
Serbia will not be freed from Ratko Mladić when his body is laid in the grave. He will be freed only when he refuses to bury with him the difference between crime and heroism. Until then, the living people will remain hostage to the dead general.
From JNA officers to genocide convicts
Ratko Mladić was born on March 12, 1942 in Božanovići near Kalinovik, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His father Neđo, a partisan, died in 1945 in a fight with the Ustasha. Mladić graduated from military school and spent almost his entire professional career in the Yugoslav People's Army.
At the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia, in 1991, he was sent to Knin, where he commanded the 9th Corps of the JNA during the war in Croatia. In May 1992, after the formal withdrawal of the JNA from Bosnia and Herzegovina, he was appointed commander of the Main Staff of the newly formed Army of the Republika Srpska. He remained in that position until the end of the war.
The forces under his command kept Sarajevo under siege for almost four years. The city was systematically exposed to artillery and sniper fire, and thousands of civilians were killed. In May and June 1995, members of the Republika Srpska Army captured United Nations peacekeepers and tied some of them to military facilities to prevent NATO airstrikes.
In July 1995, Mladic's forces occupied the UN protected zone in Srebrenica. In the days that followed, more than 8000 Bosniak men and boys were killed, while women, children and the elderly were forcibly expelled. International courts found that genocide was committed in Srebrenica.
The Hague Tribunal issued the first indictment against Mladic in July 1995, and then expanded the accusations of genocide in Srebrenica. Despite the international warrant, he lived for years under the protection of parts of the military and security system in Serbia. For a while he appeared in public, and later he hid with the help of a network of prisons.
He was arrested on May 26, 2011 in Lazarevo near Zrenjanin and soon extradited to the Hague Tribunal. By the first-instance verdict from November 2017, he was found guilty of the genocide in Srebrenica, persecution, extermination, murders, deportations and forced relocation of the population, terrorizing and illegal attacks on civilians in Sarajevo, as well as taking UN members hostage. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. The judgment was legally confirmed in June 2021.
Ratko Mladić died on August 27, 2026 in a detention hospital in The Hague, at the age of 85, serving a life sentence
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