Thousands attend funeral of convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić in Belgrade

Ratko Mladić was buried in Belgrade on a September afternoon in 2026, and thousands came to say goodbye to a man the world had convicted of genocide. He was 84 when he died in a UN prison cell in The Hague, still serving the life sentence imposed on him five years earlier for orchestrating the 1995 Srebrerica massacre, in which roughly 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically killed. That massacre stands as Europe's worst atrocity since the Second World War. Yet in Serbia, particularly among Serb nationalists and in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska, Mladić had never stopped being a hero—a national protector, a symbol of defiance.

The funeral itself became a flashpoint. A Serbian government minister had initially announced plans for a state funeral, but European leaders objected, and those plans were quietly shelved. Still, the event proceeded with remarkable official presence. The Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić and the Minister of Justice Nenad Vujić attended, standing among the crowds outside St Luka church as people filed past the coffin. The Serbian Orthodox Church's Patriarch Porfirije led the service and declared that Mladić's name would remain "deeply etched in the memory and prayers of the majority of our Serbian Orthodox people," speaking of gratitude toward him. The coffin itself had been flown back to Serbia on a government plane, carried from the aircraft by six soldiers, and draped in flags bearing his image.

By morning, long queues had formed outside the small church. Army veterans stood in the sun, many wearing flags printed with Mladić's photograph. Organizers had arranged free bus services from towns across Serbia and from Bosnia for anyone who wished to attend. Before the funeral even began, crowds gathered to light candles, a choir singing over loudspeakers. Inside, men who had served under him stood guard over the coffin while his wife, son, and grandchildren received condolences. The night before, supporters of the Serbian football club Red Star Belgrade had unveiled a display honoring Mladić ahead of their derby match.

The European Union responded swiftly and sharply. In a statement released on Monday, the EU said Mladić was "a convicted war criminal who had committed war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity." The bloc warned that "any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries." Serbia has been a candidate for EU membership since 2012, though membership talks have stalled in recent years. The funeral, and the official participation in it, risked further complicating that already difficult path.

Mladić had commanded Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992 to 1995 war, directing campaigns of ethnic cleansing meant to expel non-Serbian populations by force. His troops besieged Sarajevo for years, and more than 10,000 people died in that siege alone. He evaded capture for 16 years after his initial indictment, finally arrested in 2011. His trial lasted nine years before he was convicted and sentenced to life in 2021. The UN war crimes tribunal produced what one observer called "an incredibly detailed historical record" of his crimes. Yet that record had not penetrated Serbian public consciousness in the way it might have. Pro-government media outlets, according to analysts who followed the trial closely, depicted him as a loyal soldier simply doing his duty. The Serbian education system, they noted, had not adequately reflected the true scale of his crimes or centered the voices of victims and survivors.

For those who had lived through the war, the funeral was something else entirely. Zdravka Gvozdjar, a woman in Sarajevo whose nine-year-old son was killed by Mladić's forces during the siege, told Reuters that the funeral was "really horrible." She said Mladić "deserved to be erased from memory for good, not to be promoted as a hero." He should be remembered, she said, "only as a butcher." Her words and those of other survivors pointed to a deeper fracture in how the Balkans had processed the violence of the 1990s—a fracture that the funeral had now laid bare. Post-conflict societies, observers noted, face an extraordinarily difficult task in reckoning with their own past and acknowledging responsibility for atrocities committed in their name. Serbia's struggle with that reckoning, made visible in the crowds at Mladić's funeral and in the EU's swift condemnation, suggested that struggle was far from over.