Ratko Mladic’s glorification exposes Serbia’s failure to confront its wartime past — and raises the stakes for a student movement challenging Aleksandar Vucic’s rule.
For those who have spent the past 30 years piecing together the truth about the wars in the former Yugoslavia – lest those horrors be repeated – the scenes in Serbia and Republika Srpska following the death of Ratko Mladic were unnerving. Judges and prosecutors, civil society activists, independent journalists, and surely many ordinary citizens watched as flags, military honors, government ministers, the Church, and crowds turned the funeral of a man serving life for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide into a national tribute. Inevitably, it raised a painful question: have all our efforts been in vain?
There has been no shortage of catastrophic answers. Many argued that the 16,000 people who attended – and others who expressed admiration – did so not because they knew too little about Mladic’s crimes, but because they knew what he had done. The Bosnian-Montenegrin writer Andrej Nikolaidis put the conclusion starkly: “So it goes: they [Serbs] slaughtered people in the 1940s, and they slaughtered people in the 1990s. As soon as they are able, they will slaughter again – the grandchildren whose grandfathers and fathers they already slaughtered, in the same mountains and along the banks of the same river.”
It would be easy, and perhaps fitting, to dismiss such pronouncements as unserious, but not before considering the spectacles that made them seem plausible. At the 180th “eternal derby” between Belgrade’s Red Star and Partizan football clubs, held the day before the funeral, normally sworn enemies Delije and Grobari – the organized supporter groups, or ultras, of the rival teams – observed a minute’s silence for the convicted war criminal and wished him “eternal glory and gratitude.” Delije reenacted a scene from Mladic’s entry into Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, raising and then bringing down a replica of the “Reuf Selmanagic Crni” street sign in imitation of Mladic’s recorded order. They then unveiled a giant image of Mladic above the words “Pravac Potocari” (“Head for Potocari”) – his command to Bosnian Serb forces entering the town.
A Choreographed Display of Nationalism
Skepticism is warranted when assessing the wider societal significance of anything Serbian football hooligans say or do. A recent Center for the Study of Democracy analysis describes Delije, Grobari, and other similar groups as more than football ultras: they have repeatedly been mobilized to police political rallies, suppress protests, and perform their loyalty to ruling elites. Serbia is hardly unique in this respect. But President Aleksandar Vucic, who has spoken openly about his own past in Red Star’s violent supporter culture, has honed the political use of football ultras to an exceptional degree.
The discipline of this macabre performance makes a spontaneous outpouring of grief unlikely. Its choreographed character makes the performers no less menacing, nor their directors ignorant of Mladic’s crimes. There is little reason to imagine that Mladic or the men recreating the scene knew, or cared, who Reuf Selmanagic Crni was; his Bosniak Muslim name appears to have been enough. Selmanagic was an antifascist who joined the Partisan resistance during World War II after witnessing the persecution of Serbs.
There is a charitable explanation for what we witnessed. The peoples of the former Yugoslavia have acquired the unfortunate habit of reaching for the very worst parts of their histories when required to demonstrate who they are. Ethnic identity is performed through its most provocative symbols. Mladic is probably the very worst that Serbian history has to offer; when the time came for his sendoff into the next world, many evidently felt obliged to go through the prescribed motions of Serbian nationalist orthodoxy.
Others in the region do much the same with their own compromised heroes. Mladic was not the first war criminal whose funeral drew crowds headed by ministers and top priests. Two weeks ago, huge crowds in Kosovo and the diaspora protested the judgment in the Kosovo Specialist Chambers case against four top leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army. There, too, football grounds became a scene of nationalist fervor.
This is not to equate the crimes or their scale: when it comes to the 1990s, Serb nationalists are truly in a league of their own. It is to recognize a common mechanism: insecure identities affirm themselves through figures whose celebration most offends the rival group. Northern Ireland offers a close enough parallel, with republicans commemorating IRA volunteers and loyalists memorializing UVF and UDA gunmen. The rival group’s outrage does not merely accompany the commemoration; it gives the symbol its power.
We should also remember that today’s Western Balkan societies were constituted around the aspirations for which they went to war in the 1990s. Some were realized and written into constitutions; others failed, as did Serbia’s attempt to retain Kosovo, whose continued status as Serbian territory endures as constitutional fiction. The crimes committed in pursuit of these projects cannot be cleanly separated from the projects themselves. Thirty-one years have passed since Bosnia’s war and 27 since Kosovo. Yet, listen to how people speak and before long you will hear “ovaj rat” (this war). The phrase is revealing: the blood-soaked past has morphed into an unruly present.
Just a month after the grand funeral for former Bosnian Serb military chief Mladic, Republika Srpska will bid farewell to another high-ranking war criminal when Biljana Plavsic is laid to rest 7 October in the entity capital, Banja Luka, following a ceremony in Belgrade. Plavsic served as the entity’s president from 1996 to 1998. In 2003, the ICTY sentenced her to 11 years in prison for carrying out persecution on political, racial, and religious grounds, amounting to crimes against humanity. Importantly, the verdict was the result of a guilty plea, rather than a conviction following a full trial. She died on 1 October in Belgrade at the age of 96. Dodik lauded her as “someone who, in difficult times, together with the leadership of the then Republika Srpska, stood up in defense of the Serb people . … She fought for the Serb people. As president of Republika Srpska, she deserves every honor.”
As it often does, you may say. Except, the failure of political classes in Serbia and Republika Srpska to confront that past has peculiar features. One political generation after another has found it easier to remain within nationalist orthodoxy than to open electorally difficult questions. What began as cowardice became doctrine. What makes modern Serbian nationalist doctrine particularly unsettling is that its success seems to flow directly from its moral and logical incoherence.
Consider the official position on Srebrenica. Contrary to popular assumption, the Serbian state denies neither the fact nor the enormity of the killings. A 2010 parliamentary declaration condemns the massacre. If you do not trust the Serbian state, which is rarely a bad idea, take the man who has spent 14 years capturing it: “There are no words with which anyone could adequately express the sorrow and grief for those who were killed, or the anger and indignation toward those who committed that monstrous crime. Serbia clearly and unequivocally condemns this appalling crime, abhors those who participated in it, and will continue to bring them to justice,” the then Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said in 2015. Vucic has voiced this take on Srebrenica a number of times since, including earlier this week on CNN.
We can set aside here – even though it is hardly unimportant – the Serbian establishment’s refusal to accept that the massacre constituted genocide, contrary to the final judgments and findings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). By giving Mladic a state funeral in all but name, the Serbian state in effect asked its people to adopt as their hero a man who masterminded and oversaw mass executions that the state itself calls monstrous. In other words, courtesy of their own government, Serbian citizens are being held hostage to the cult of a monster presented as a hero, with instances of discomfort flowing from this cognitive dissonance yet to be recorded. Beat that for a triumph of post-truth politics!
From Reckoning to Rehabilitation
It was not always obvious that things would end this way. In 2004, a commission appointed by the Republika Srpska government to investigate the Srebrenica massacre recognized that thousands of Bosniaks had been murdered; the entity’s president, Dragan Cavic, called the crime a black page in Serbian history. The following year, video of Serbian paramilitaries executing six Bosniak prisoners produced something approaching public shock. Politicians condemned the killings, suspects were arrested, and human-rights activists briefly gained national airtime. In that atmosphere Milorad Dodik, the chief genocide denier of later years, called Srebrenica genocide in 2007 and repeatedly said that Mladic must stand trial. The general, who was hiding in Serbia at the time, was arrested and extradited to the ICTY only in 2011.
The staging of Mladic’s return measured how far Serbia has traveled since. His coffin was flown from The Hague aboard a Serbian government plane, accompanied by Serbia’s justice minister, Mladic’s son and granddaughter, and two former military associates. Six Serbian Army soldiers carried the coffin, draped in the Serbian flag, from the plane to a waiting vehicle at Belgrade airport. Police escorted it to the Military Medical Academy. At the funeral, the patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church himself officiated the last rites.
The contrast with Slobodan Milosevic was striking. When the CEO of Serbia’s 1990s nationalist project died in ICTY custody in 2006, his coffin returned aboard a scheduled JAT flight. It traveled in the cargo hold and emerged on an aircraft conveyor belt behind suitcases and a baby stroller. Milosevic was buried in the courtyard of his family home. Although Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica was a committed nationalist, his government refused Milosevic a state funeral, while the then president, Boris Tadic, called even the idea “absolutely inappropriate.” By then, a Serbian court had found that political opponent Ivan Stambolic was murdered on Milosevic’s orders in 2000.
The real scandal of Mladic’s last rites, then, may not lie in the numbers. Those performing at the Red Star stadium were mostly regime stooges; many at the funeral were diehard regime supporters bused in for the occasion. The scandal lies in the reversal they were mobilized to perform.
Serge Brammertz, then chief ICTY prosecutor in The Hague, warned already in 2016 that positive trends in dealing with 1990s crimes were now going in the wrong direction. “Too many politicians and public figures are denying well-established truths, enflaming ethnic tensions and repeating nationalistic slogans of the past. What would have been difficult to imagine just a few years ago is sadly commonplace today.” He has repeated similar warnings many times since.
In the absence of a convincing political horizon, nationalist narratives have had time to consolidate. They now function less as passionate beliefs than as rules of public etiquette. Politicians, television presenters, football supporters, and social-media users know what they are expected to say. Departing from the script carries a cost; repeating it requires no explanation. But this describes the regression rather than explaining it.
Europe’s Bargain With Vucic
The responsibility of the European Union for enabling Serbia’s democratic deterioration comes into play here. Western governments – France and Germany in particular – have treated Vucic as an indispensable manager of Balkan stability. His promises concerning Kosovo, Serbia’s role as an indirect supplier of ammunition to Ukraine, its lithium reserves coveted by European industry, and his occasional gestures of distance from Moscow have repeatedly counted for more than the country’s democratic institutions.
The bargain has been morally compromising and strategically shortsighted. Vucic has presided over a system in which the boundaries separating the ruling party, the state, aggressively partisan and often unspeakably profane media, organized crime, the Church, and street-level coercion have become blurred. European institutions have documented the erosion of media freedom, electoral integrity, and the rule of law, yet European leaders continue to offer him ceremonial welcomes, investment agreements, and the appearance of international indispensability.
French President Emmanuel Macron received Vucic at the Elysee Palace only two days after Mladic’s funeral. Although EU officials condemned the Serbian state’s involvement, they appeared to play down its significance and distance Vucic personally from it. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa called “the elements of official support and the presence of some senior Serbian officials at the funeral” deeply regrettable. Two weeks later, cameras recorded a notably warm encounter between von der Leyen and Vucic at the UN General Assembly – the same man she has repeatedly addressed as “dear Aleksandar.”
For all intents and purposes, Vucic is the Serbian state. Although the constitution grants him few executive powers, he decides virtually everything – especially matters involving money, the repressive apparatus, and the propaganda diet fed to the public. There is no way the details of Serbia’s sendoff for Mladic were settled without his say-so.
Even if Western support for the early Vucic could once be justified by his usefulness over Kosovo and the absence of a credible Serbian alternative, the numbers now undermine that bargain even on its own realpolitik terms. Since the collapse of the concrete canopy at Novi Sad’s main railway station on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people and severely injured another, Vucic’s dominance has visibly weakened. A powerful student movement, led by young people who developed strong civic values despite the criminalized and hate-saturated environment his regime created, seized the initiative and forced an early parliamentary election for 25 October.
Barred by term limits from another presidential mandate, Vucic resigned on 28 September and now leads the Serbian Progressive Party’s (SNS) campaign as its prospective prime minister. Polling is contested, but credible independent surveys have placed the student list ahead of SNS. Election monitors – including members of the official electoral commission – have warned that the register of voters contains at least 200,000 names that should not be there. Electoral manipulation may be Vucic’s best route to a declared victory, but even a fraudulent result may struggle to produce a governing majority.
Even in the Trump era, the EU’s strategic and democratic interests clearly lie with the students. Yet they have received almost none of the warmth Europe has lavished on “dear Aleksandar.” The immediate question is how Europe will respond if Vucic refuses to accept a student-list victory and again turns to coercion and loyalist street muscle, including the nationalist networks displayed around the funeral. Make no mistake: Vucic and the kleptocratic system around him see this contest in existential terms. Extreme and violent scenarios cannot be discounted.
Weaponizing the Wartime Past
The needs of political competition dictate how – and in what doses – political classes feed wartime legacies to their electorates. Mladic died conveniently, as Vucic readied to call an early election and the nationalist regime run in all but name by the banned Dodik in Republika Srpska campaigned going into Bosnia’s general election on 4 October, which saw his ruling party maintain its leading role. The elaborate sendoff served both regimes by pushing campaign debate onto patriotic territory, which they consider their home ground. It also reminded voters what they might confront if an election result has to be defended in the streets: the brute force of a criminalized security apparatus and football hooligans, all blessed by the Church.
Of course, the media are key actors in this performance. Mladic’s death was not merely news but an irresistible infotainment opportunity. Editors on every side of the ethnic divide knew that the more inflammatory the image or headline, the greater the traffic. Each provocation generated a response from the other side, then another headline, and another round of indignation.
The deterioration Brammertz and others have identified coincides with the advent of social media. The region’s 1990s grievances are as if designed for the social-media age. Social platforms extend the cycle indefinitely, returning people to territory traversed thousands of times and offering little except confirmation. Mladic’s admirers see proof that the world hates the Serbs. Others see evidence that the Serbs have learned nothing. Everyone receives the expected gratification.
Unless we believe that large numbers of people, many born years after Srebrenica, are monsters awaiting an opportunity to repeat that massacre, we must ask what participation in this game provides. Belonging is part of the answer. So is peer pressure. In societies offering few attractive ways to imagine a collective future, the inherited past becomes the cheapest available identity. People reach for Mladic partly because everyone around them appears to be reaching for him.
Understanding this mechanism must never mean sanitizing its central figure. Mladic was no borderline case. His guilt was established through an immense body of documentary evidence, intercepted communications, recordings, and testimony from hundreds of witnesses, including insiders from his own camp. The final judgment found him responsible for genocide at Srebrenica, the persecution and removal of Bosniaks and Croats across Bosnia, terrorizing Sarajevo’s civilian population, and taking UN personnel hostage.
Some of the recorded material is not merely incriminating but obscene: the boasting, threats, and bureaucratic organization of violence reveal a man for whom cruelty had become both instrument and spectacle. It is also too often forgotten that Mladic established his methods in Croatia in 1991. Croatian legal proceedings connected him to numerous crimes against the civilian population in Dalmatia. That record did not impede his advancement; it established the credentials that led to his appointment as commander of the Bosnian Serb army.
The fact that Mladic began his war-criminal career in Croatia, now an EU member, makes Europe’s tolerance of Vucic more problematic still. If the Serbian strongman tries to claim an illegitimate victory on 25 October, the EU should at the very least refuse to recognize it.
Tihomir Loza, a former deputy director of Transitions, manages the organization’s projects in the Balkans.
