Mladic funeral deepens Bosnia divide as election looms

When Ratko Mladic's body arrived in Belgrade in early September, the Serbian government was careful to say it had not organized a state funeral. The distinction mattered to officials in Belgrade, who wanted distance from the optics of honoring a man convicted of genocide. But the details told a different story. The justice minister accompanied the coffin. Military units provided ceremonial honors. Senior political figures attended. The ceremonies unfolded in state-controlled venues. And from the government came no clear statement condemning the glorification of a war criminal. The message, whatever the official framing, was unmistakable.

The funeral's reverberations crossed the border into Bosnia and Herzegovina almost immediately, splitting a country that has never fully healed from the war Mladic helped wage. Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity that comprises roughly half of Bosnia's territory, sent its officials to Belgrade. There, mourners gathered by the thousands, repeating a refrain that captured their view: without Mladic, there would be no Republika Srpska. The narrative was one of vindication—a man who had defended his people against an unjust international system. In Sarajevo, the seat of the central government, the reaction was sharp and immediate. Foreign Minister Elmedin Konakovic announced that Bosnia was withdrawing nearly all diplomatic staff from its embassy in Belgrade, leaving only the ambassador, whose authority did not extend to closing the mission entirely. Consular services would relocate to Zagreb and Podgorica. The move was a deliberate freeze on day-to-day diplomatic contact. Denis Becirovic, chair of Bosnia's presidency, called the funeral an "anti-civilizational act" and warned of consequences for the entire region.

For families of those killed in Srebrenica and other war crimes, the public ceremony was a fresh wound. Any celebration of Mladic was, by definition, a celebration of their loss. The Office of the High Representative, the international body created after the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement to oversee Bosnia's reconstruction, issued a statement making clear that the country's future could not be built on honoring those responsible for the worst atrocities of the past. Glorifying convicted war criminals, the office said, creates divisions, inflicts pain on victims, and undermines reconciliation.

But the funeral was never only about the past. Both Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina faced elections in the coming weeks—Bosnia on October 4, Serbia likely shortly after. In both countries, portions of the electorate still viewed Mladic as a symbol of resistance, which meant that every gesture toward him could be converted into political capital. In Sarajevo, sharp condemnations of the funeral allowed the central government to position itself as defending the state and the dignity of victims. In Republika Srpska, the presence of officials at the ceremony and the narrative of international injustice strengthened those building their political identity in opposition to international courts and rulings. Tanja Topic, a political analyst based in Banja Luka, saw the pattern clearly. The main culprits, she said, were the political elites themselves. In thirty years since the war ended, there had been no genuine reckoning with the darkest chapters of history. Mladic's funeral was a gift to those pushing ethno-nationalist politics, and those people still held power. "Such an institutional stance towards crimes provokes a reaction on the other side, and then everyone exploits the situation, trapping us in a vicious circle where each tries to extract political profit," Topic said.

The result was a deepening of the divisions that have defined Bosnia since 1995. Relations between Sarajevo and Belgrade froze. The prospect of either country joining the European Union receded further into the distance. And the ideology that had sparked the war in the first place—the belief that ethnic groups could not coexist, that history was a zero-sum competition—remained alive in the political mainstream. Thirty-one years after the war ended, Bosnia remained a deeply divided society. Mladic's funeral did not close a chapter; it tore open a new one, exposing how far the region still had to travel to move beyond the 1990s.