Crowds Gather In Belgrade For Funeral Of Convicted Bosnian Serb War Criminal Ratko Mladic

Large crowds gathered in Belgrade on Monday morning for the funeral of Ratko Mladic, the convicted war criminal whose death has reignited deep divisions across the Balkans, as European Union officials in Brussels accused segments of Serbian society of "glorification" of a man found guilty of genocide during the 1990s war in Bosnia. Mladic died in late August at the age of 84 while serving a life sentence in The Hague, where he had been convicted of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity for atrocities committed during the Bosnian war, most notably the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in what was then a United Nations-protected safe zone.

Mourners began streaming into St Luka church in Belgrade from 7am (0500 GMT) to pay their respects, with many kissing Mladic's closed coffin as Serbian Orthodox priests recited prayers over the proceedings. Police closed off surrounding streets as crowds continued to arrive throughout the morning, and AFP reporters at the scene described large numbers of attendees, many wearing shirts bearing tributes to Mladic. Aerial images showed hundreds of people already queuing outside the church before its doors opened. Serbian flags had been hung throughout the area, and a large banner strung across the street read a message welcoming Mladic as a "general" and thanking his mother for bearing a "hero," expressing hope for the return of what it called "Serbdom's glory."

Among those in attendance was Radojka Visic, a pensioner who had traveled from Republika Srpska, Bosnia's Serb-majority entity, to attend the service. She described Mladic as a national hero and suggested that international forces, unable to defeat Bosnian Serb forces militarily, had instead pursued his imprisonment and mistreatment through legal means. Her comments reflect a broader sentiment among some Serbian nationalists who continue to view Mladic as a wartime leader rather than as a perpetrator of genocide, a characterization starkly at odds with the findings of the United Nations war crimes tribunal that convicted him.

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The scenes in Belgrade on Monday follow similarly charged displays last week when Mladic's casket arrived in the country aboard a government plane, carried by six soldiers and draped in flags. As the motorcade transported the casket from the airport, groups of young men held banners praising the former general, and some police officers were observed saluting as the procession passed, images that drew significant international criticism. That earlier display prompted the European Union's enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, to cancel a planned visit to Serbia last Friday, stating that the glorification surrounding Mladic's death was incompatible with the values underpinning the EU accession process that Serbia has been pursuing.

The reaction extended beyond Brussels as well, with Denis Becirovic, chairman of Bosnia's tripartite presidency, describing the events as an act of identification by Serbia's leadership with one of the worst perpetrators of mass killing in modern European history. The funeral and the accompanying public displays underscore the unresolved and deeply polarizing legacy of the Bosnian war three decades on, with Mladic remaining a figure whom many in the international community regard as one of the era's most notorious war criminals, even as he continues to be publicly honored by segments of the Serbian population and diaspora.

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