The announcement that Ratko Mladić will be buried with the highest state honors once again raises the question of Serbia’s relationship with its wartime past, judicially established crimes, and the politics of memory.
By Nenad Chanak
A state is perhaps seen most clearly not in what is written in its constitution, nor in what its presidents say before foreign ambassadors, but in whose presence it lowers its flag over a coffin, for whom it lines up an honor guard, and for whom it orders rifles to fire into the sky, because the highest state honors are not mere protocol intended for a dead body, but a judgment of values that the living pronounce upon themselves. The announcement by Serbia’s Justice Minister Nenad Vujić that Ratko Mladić will be buried with the highest state honors therefore says less about Mladić, whose biography was concluded by a final judgment for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, than it does about Serbia, which is once again trying to place a flag between itself and its own past, convinced that beneath it neither the blood, nor the mass graves, nor the sixteen years spent hiding a man who demanded that others die while lacking even the courage to surrender himself will be visible. This is not merely the burial of a convicted man, but a ritual through which the regime seeks to turn a judgment into an injustice, a criminal into a symbol, and that symbol into yet another trumpeted confirmation that Serbia is always innocent, even when it bestows state honors upon precisely that from which it claims to distance itself.
Ratko Mladić did not emerge from a hajduk ballad, did not descend from a fresco, and did not receive his rank from some mythical Serbian vojvoda, as nationalist iconography portrays him today. He was educated, fed, clothed, and promoted by socialist Yugoslavia, whose sworn officer he had been since 1965. He was a product of the Yugoslav People’s Army, of its educational system, its hierarchy, and its communist ideology, a man who built his career in Skopje, Štip, Priština, and Knin, wearing the red star and swearing allegiance to a state founded on brotherhood and unity. The JNA brought him to the rank of colonel; the Presidency of the SFRY promoted him to major general on October 4, 1991; and that same, by then truncated federal military apparatus promoted him to lieutenant general on April 24, 1992, only a few weeks before, at Radovan Karadžić’s proposal, he was appointed commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska. In June 1994, Karadžić promoted him to colonel general, while his rank within the system of the Yugoslav Army was confirmed through the institutions of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under President Zoran Lilić. His epaulettes, therefore, form a precise history of his transformation: the first were given to him by the state he helped destroy, the next by a political leadership that used war to create ethnically cleansed territory, and the last by Belgrade, which claimed it had nothing to do with that war.
The transition from communist officer to nationalist general, however, was no spiritual conversion, but merely a change of vocabulary within the same authoritarian pattern: the red star was removed from the cap, but the cult of force remained, as did the commander’s infallibility, contempt for the individual, the secrecy of the system, and the need to divide the world into the obedient and the enemy. In place of class came nation; in place of the counterrevolutionary came the Muslim, the Croat, or the “traitor”; and what had once been the defense of the socialist state became the defense of ethnic territory, while the human being was once again regarded only as material to be deployed, removed, or destroyed. The most terrifying proof that Mladić was not unaware of what was being prepared lies in his own words, spoken on May 12, 1992, before the Assembly of the Bosnian Serbs, when, discussing the idea of separating the population so that only Serbs would remain in certain areas, he said: “People, that would be genocide.” He knew the word, understood its meaning, and foresaw the nature of the project, and then accepted the role of becoming its military arm. Ignorance can sometimes mitigate moral guilt; delusion can explain a wrong choice; but a man who names the crime in advance and then places his authority, his army, and his knowledge at its service can appeal to neither.
The judgment against Ratko Mladić does not rest on political impression, a single television image, or an enemy interpretation, but on 530 days of trial, 592 witnesses, and nearly ten thousand pieces of evidence admitted before the court. The Trial Chamber found that Mladić ordered the separation of Bosniak men from women, children, and the elderly in Potočari, that he was present while his soldiers carried out the order, and that he told prisoners in Nova Kasaba and Sandići that they would be fed, accommodated, and exchanged, even though he was already part of the plan for their destruction. At a meeting in the Bratunac command center on July 13, 1995, which he attended with officers of the VRS and the Interior Ministry, Interior Ministry units were assigned a task described in an official document as the killing of approximately eight thousand Muslim men blocked near Konjević Polje. Only two days earlier, in Srebrenica, Mladić had said that the time had come to “take revenge on the Turks,” as though the people standing before him were not human beings born in the twentieth century, but long-dead adversaries from the mythology of uprisings, while at meetings in the Hotel Fontana he told Bosniak representatives that their people could “live or disappear,” that is, “survive or vanish.” The Trial Chamber concluded that the only reasonable inference from his orders, actions, and statements was that he possessed the specific intent to commit genocide, and the Appeals Chamber upheld that finding together with his life sentence.
In Srebrenica, however, it was not only people who were killed, but also the truth about their killing, because organized crime never ends with the final bullet; it continues with the camera, the communiqué, the ban on access, and the relocation of bones. The judgment describes how Mladić distributed food and water before cameras to people whose expulsion he had already organized, how some soldiers handed out chocolate and cigarettes only while the camera was running and then took them back, and how he ordered the footage to be sold to foreign agencies. He also ordered journalists barred from the areas of Srebrenica and Žepa and prohibited the release of information about prisoners, refugees, and “evacuated” civilians, while the bodies were later exhumed from primary graves and moved into secondary graves in order to erase the evidence. The camera thus became part of the weaponry, chocolate became stage scenery, and the word “evacuation” became a linguistic pit into which the fact was meant to be buried that women and children had been expelled while men were taken to killing grounds. Mladić commanded not only the killing, but also the image that was meant to survive the killing, and that may be the fullest form of criminal consciousness: not merely knowing what you are doing, but simultaneously constructing the lie through which you will demand that future generations honor you for it.
Srebrenica was not a sudden deviation from his military biography, but its final and most terrifying expression. The Court found that Mladić played a leading role in four joint criminal enterprises: the permanent removal of Bosniaks and Croats from territories to which Bosnian Serbs claimed entitlement, the terrorization of Sarajevo’s population through sniper and artillery fire, the genocide in Srebrenica, and the taking of United Nations personnel as hostages. With regard to Sarajevo, it was found that he personally directed fire, selected targets so as to avoid “Serb” parts of the city, ordered the production and use of modified aerial bombs, and ordered utility systems cut off so that civilians would be forced into streets exposed to snipers. This was not the uncontrolled brutality of a few soldiers, nor an unfortunate consequence of legitimate combat, but a campaign whose established purpose was to spread fear among civilians, accompanied by restrictions on humanitarian aid, anti-Muslim propaganda, and the punishment of an entire city because it refused to be divided according to the designs of nationalist cartographers.
Then come the documents that turn the state lie that Serbia did not participate in the war in Bosnia into an almost grotesque construction, because the war was fought not only with flags but with payrolls, personnel records, fuel tankers, ammunition crates, and meetings of general staffs. The Mladić judgment found that the military involvement of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in Bosnia did not end with the formal withdrawal of the JNA in May 1992, but that the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army established the secret 30th Personnel Center, through which officers serving in the VRS received salaries, pension credits, and other rights as members of the Yugoslav Army. It was also established that from May 1992 to April 1995 nearly ninety percent of the ammunition used by the VRS came from the JNA and the Yugoslav Army, that Mladić directly arranged assistance with Života Panić and Momčilo Perišić, and that some of the material obtained from Serbia was used in attacks on civilians in Sarajevo. The war, then, could cross the Drina in an ammunition convoy, on a military payroll, and in a decree of promotion; only in the official communiqué was it not permitted to exist.
When he was first indicted on July 24, 1995, Mladić did not do what a man who believes in his innocence and in the military honor he endlessly invoked would have done. Instead, he spent nearly sixteen years evading the court, living under the protection of a network of helpers and elements of the military and security apparatus, until he was found on May 26, 2011, in a relative’s house in Lazarevo. The man who had promised captive men that they would be exchanged while they were being taken toward execution sites sought for himself everything he had denied them: time, safety, medicine, family, and the right to grow old. That is the essence of his cowardly pathos, because cowardice is not merely fear of the bullet, but the refusal to stand before the consequences of one’s own orders. Sixteen years in hiding were not the flight of one man from an international court, but the state’s prolonged cooperation with that flight, and so Mladić was not a needle Serbia could not find in a haystack, but a man whom the haystack of state secrets, pensions, connections, and complicit silence did not wish to reveal.
The 2007 judgment of the International Court of Justice is legally more complex than the slogans through which Serbia’s authorities invoke it. The Court did not find that the genocide in Srebrenica had been committed by Serbia through its state organs, nor that the acts of the VRS could, under the criteria applied at the time, be attributed to Serbia. But it did find that Serbia had violated its obligation to prevent genocide, had failed in its duty to punish and to cooperate with the Hague Tribunal, especially because it had not surrendered Ratko Mladić, and had failed to comply with the Court’s earlier provisional measures. This is not a judgment of spotless innocence, but a judgment against a state that possessed political, military, and financial influence, knew of the danger, and failed to do what it was obliged to do. Serbia’s political division therefore does not lie in the judgment itself, but in the way Belgrade reads it: the part in which direct state responsibility was not established is repeated like an absolving prayer, while the part concerning the failure to prevent genocide, the failure to punish those responsible, and the hiding of Mladić is erased as though it had never been written.
Of course Serbs are not a genocidal people, just as no people are, because criminal responsibility belongs to individuals, commanders, political leaderships, and institutions, not to a newborn child, a language, a religion, or a nation. That is precisely why the regime’s 2024 campaign under the slogan “We are not a genocidal people” was so hypocritical: the United Nations resolution on Srebrenica did not declare Serbs a genocidal people, but explicitly emphasized individual responsibility and rejected its attribution to an entire ethnic or religious community. The regime invented a collective indictment so that it could then present itself as the collective defender, draped flags over billboards and buildings, and shielded the judgments with the body of an entire people. Now the same regime announces the highest state honors for the very man whose individual responsibility for genocide has been established by a final judgment, and in doing so performs the very identification it claimed to oppose: it places the convicted man beneath the national flag, and then declares every condemnation of his acts an attack on the flag and the nation. Mladić once used UN personnel as human shields against air strikes; today the regime is trying to position all citizens of Serbia and all Serbs as a moral shield around his coffin.
The announcement of state honors also contains a question the authorities cannot answer without demolishing one of their own lies: whose general was Ratko Mladić? If he was exclusively a general of the Army of Republika Srpska, meaning the armed forces of another political entity in another state, why is the Republic of Serbia granting him the highest state honors, and under whose protocol? If, however, he was also a general within the system of the Yugoslav Army, a man whose ranks were validated in Belgrade, whose officers were paid through the Yugoslav Army General Staff, and whose army was supplied from Serbia, then what remains of the claim that Serbia had nothing to do with the war in Bosnia? A funeral is not legal proof of state responsibility and cannot alter what the International Court of Justice ruled, but it can amount to a political confession more sincere than all official statements, because states often reveal themselves most completely precisely when they are silent, line up the guard, and stand at attention.
That is where Serbia’s moral abyss begins, an abyss made not only of wartime lies but of the general corruption of meaning. Corruption is not merely an envelope passed under the table, a rigged tender, or public money poured into a private villa; its deepest form arises when words themselves are bribed, when cowardice begins to be called heroism, hiding is called sacrifice, defeat is called victory, crime is called defense, and state shame is called national pride. The Belgrade čaršija—that closed circle of court, tabloids, tycoons, retired generals, academic salons, pulpits, and party loyalists—has institutionally destroyed almost everything in Serbia that was honorable, civic, antifascist, and European, turning the past into a warehouse of myths, the present into a market of obedience, and the future into a debt to be paid by generations not yet born. It appropriated the Partisan legacy of Mladić’s father in order to decorate the nationalist path of his son; it appropriated Serbian victims in order to erase the victims of others; it appropriated Europe as a source of money while rejecting its idea of responsibility, law, and human dignity. In this way it transformed the Serbia of Dositej, Dimitrije Tucović, the antifascists, and all those who had the courage to tell their own people an unpleasant truth into a state in which the most profitable form of patriotism is lying “in the name of the people.”
No people becomes genocidal because of the crimes of individuals, but a state can become morally crippled when it turns those individuals into role models, their judgments into national insults, and their funerals into state celebrations. The guilt of ancestors is not inherited, but the obligation not to repeat their crimes is; just as another person’s honor cannot be inherited if one lacks the strength to affirm it through one’s own actions. Ratko Mladić has been convicted, and his judgment is final; the judgment on Serbia is not, because every generation pronounces it anew through the choice between truth and consoling lies, between compassion for the victim and admiration for the executioner, between a future that remembers and a past that ceaselessly demands new victims. State honors can give a dead man nothing more, but they can deprive the living of their measure of good and evil. In the end, therefore, a state is not measured by whom it knew how to bury, but by before whom it chose to stand at attention; and when it stands at attention before a crime, it is not honoring a dead man—it is burying its own future.
*The author is a journalist and political analyst from Serbia who writes about politics, society, nationalism, dealing with the past, and democratic processes in the region.
This article was written exclusively for BalkanView.