Former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, nicknamed “The Butcher of the Balkans” for his role in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, will have a funeral with “the military and state honors to which he is entitled”, announced on local radio K1 Nenad Vujic, Serbian Minister of Justice.
Seriously ill for months, Ratko Mladic died Thursday in The Hague, where he was serving a life prison sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Also read‘Butcher of the Balkans’ Ratko Mladic, former Bosnian Serb military leader, dies
“It is certain that General Mladic will receive all the military and state honors to which he is entitled,” the Serbian minister said. In the country, some still consider him a hero today.
Serbian officials are waiting to hear when authorities in The Hague will hand over the body, he said.
The Srebrenica massacre is the worst killing in Europe since the Second World War. There, Serbian forces under the command of Ratko Mladic executed 8,000 Muslim Bosnians who had sought refuge in what was supposed to be a United Nations-protected enclave.
To haveSrebrenica, thirty years later: a city still marked by the genocide
More than thirty years later, Srebrenica, populated by 60% Bosniaks and 40% Serbs, is struggling to heal its wounds. She remains deeply haunted by the memory of this massacre, a symbol of the wars that broke up Yugoslavia.
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Mladic died a few days after the latest rejection by the International Mechanism, called to exercise the residual functions of the Criminal Courts, of the request of his family and the Serbian government to transfer him to a military hospital in Belgrade for treatment.
To readSrebrenica genocide: “We must act to prevent similar crimes from happening again”
This man embodied the military face of a sinister trio – alongside former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in 2006 in his cell in The Hague, and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, sentenced in 2019 to life imprisonment for crimes of genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war. – at the time when the former Yugoslavia was sinking into carnage after the fall of communism.
The 1992-1995 war in Bosnia left around 100,000 dead and 2.2 million people displaced.
With AFP
