The Serb-Bosnian general Ratko Mladic, who was serving a life sentence for genocide during the bloody Bosnia war of 1992-1995, died this Thursday at the age of 84 in the United Nations detention center in The Hague, according to the Belgrade television network Informer TV.
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Mladic was convicted of genocide for orchestrating the massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in 1995 in a UN-designated “safe area” in Bosnia, the worst atrocity committed in Europe since World War II.
Nicknamed ‘the Butcher of the Balkans’, Ratko Mladic was born on March 12, 1942, in a small village south of Sarajevo, in a family struck by tragedy, with his parents victims of World War II. Before becoming one of the perpetrators of the genocide in Bosnia, whose most dramatic episode was experienced in Srebrenica, Mladic was an officer of the former communist Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) when the disintegration of Yugoslavia began in 1991.
President Slobodan Milosevic, who also died in 2006 in the Scheveningen detention center in The Hague before concluding his trial for war crimes and genocide, put him in charge of the Serb-Bosnian military. Ratko Mladic led the first offensive against Bosnia-Herzegovina after it declared independence in 1992 and never relinquished military command until the end of the war. For this reason, he is considered responsible for the siege and bombing of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, for three and a half years. He also assumed operational command of the siege and conquest of Srebrenica, where more than 6,000 Muslims were killed.
Leading the Serb-Bosnian military, Ratko Mladic directed the first offensive against Bosnia-Herzegovina after it declared independence in 1992 and never relinquished military command until the end of the war. For this reason, he is considered responsible for the siege and bombing of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, for three and a half years. He also assumed operational command of the siege and conquest of Srebrenica, where more than 6,000 Muslims were killed.
The ruthless blue-eyed former communist officer, turned nationalist leader, was one of the most infamous figures of the conflict that left more than 100,000 dead and over a million homeless. He even ordered his troops to “burn the brains” of Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a “Serbian god.”
When the ethnic war broke out in Bosnia in 1992, Mladic took control of large areas of the country to form a Serbian mini-state. The Serbs under Mladic’s command established concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, systematically murdered prisoners, and organized the systematic rape of Bosnian Muslim women.
The Srebrenica massacre was the horrific culmination of a war that lasted more than three years. The bodies from Srebrenica were buried in mass graves over four days in July 1995; some were exhumed and moved to remote mountains to hide evidence of the massacre.
The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was “ethnic cleansing”: the forced expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian territories and create a Greater Serbia.
The tribunal determined that Mladic, along with Milosevic and the Serb-Bosnian political leader Radovan Karadzic—who is also serving a life sentence in The Hague—were part of a criminal conspiracy to carry out this plan.
“I do not recognize this court,” Mladic declared during an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017, he shouted: “This is all a lie, you are all liars!”
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Karadzic and Mladic topped the ICTY’s most wanted list for years after the war ended by Western powers. However, until Milosevic was overthrown by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived safely—though discreetly—in Belgrade.
The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of cruelty, audacity, and brutality in the Serbian warrior tradition, once valued in the partisan life-or-death struggle against Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II.
In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners died suffocated by heat after being forced to eat salt and deprived of water; were starved and raped in prisoner camps; forced to jump from a bridge and shot; and hundreds were shot during the night after being expelled from their detention centers with chemical gas.
“For me, Mladic is a symbol of all the horrible crimes that happened during the war: our girls were raped and our children killed, just for being Muslims,” said Munira Subasic, whose son and husband were killed by Serb-Bosnian forces after the capture of Srebrenica.
“The Germans had Hitler, the Serbs have Mladic,” Subasic continued. “There is no difference between the two.”
Mladic had a cameraman film the bombing of the besieged enclave of Srebrenica to show it while praising his men and rallying the Dutch UN peacekeepers, who naively accepted his solemn promise that the inhabitants would be safe in their hands. Srebrenica supposedly had the status of a “safe area,” intended to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.
“We give this city to the Serbian people as a gift,” Mladic said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against the Muslim Turks, who once controlled the area as part of the Ottoman Empire.
The next day, Mladic’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising them safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were preparing to be executed.
When NATO tried in 1995 to contain his forces with the threat of limited air strikes, his troops, defying the rules, captured UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to potential targets.
In November 1996, Mladic and the senior generals yielded to strong Western pressure to resign, as ordered by Serb-Bosnian president Biljana Plavsic, Karadzic’s successor, who was later imprisoned for her participation in war crimes.
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