An official plane of the Republic of Serbia transported on Thursday from The Hague to Belgrade the coffin of Ratko Mladic, the person responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and convicted of genocide. The coffin was wrapped with the national flag. On the trip, the Minister of Justice, Nenad Vujic, the same one who confirmed after his death that he would receive a state funeral, accompanied the family members. It was soldiers who took care of transferring it to the van that was going to take it to the military hospital, while people stationed along the route glorified the general with banners and flares.
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“Ratko Mladic was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The return of his mortal remains to Belgrade reminds Europe of the darkest pages of our recent history,” wrote on her X account this Friday Marta Kos, EU Enlargement Commissioner, to announce that she immediately canceled the visit she had scheduled to Serbia to address the stalemate in negotiations with the Balkan country. “The glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built. That path requires facing the past, genuine reconciliation, and respect for the victims of war crimes. The values that support our common future are non-negotiable,” Kos added.
The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vucic, called Kos’s accusations “stupid,” according to AFP. “Were we supposed to ban the funeral? Ban people from attending? Not regulate traffic?” he said. “Marta Kos is not going to give me lessons on who is a criminal and who is not”, the president added.
The commissioner posted the message just after Mladic’s son, Darko, gave details of the farewell of the Butcher of Bosnia: this Saturday at noon a military ceremony was held, in which veterans, reserve officers of the Army of the Republic of Srpska, and representatives of Serbian military associations at the Army House in Belgrade participated, as well as his family members. Inside there were about 300 people, according to AFP, and dozens of supporters who had to stay outside. Also attending were the Serbian Minister of Justice, Nenad Vujic, and the president of the Serbian entity of Bosnia – the Republika Srpska -, Sinisa Karan, among others.
Afterwards, the lying in state chapel at the Church of St. Luke in the Serbian capital is scheduled to be set up, where a large number of people are expected to attend. From there, the funeral procession will depart early Monday morning to the Topider cemetery. There he will be buried alongside his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994 at age 23 with one of her father’s weapons, while the Bosnian war was ongoing.
“Commissioner Kos is right not to travel to Belgrade,” Bosnian Adnan Cerimagic, analyst in Berlin for the think tank European Stability Initiative, tells EL MUNDO. Although he believes that the EU needs to do “a conscience check on how it manages its relationship with Serbia and this government.” “The appeasement has only caused Serbia to become increasingly less democratic, weaker in terms of the rule of law, and more aggressive towards its neighbors,” he continues.
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“What would be truly decisive is for Kaja Kallas and, above all, Ursula von der Leyen to unequivocally support this same message,” highlights Serbian Naim Leo Besiri, director of the Institute for European Affairs in Belgrade.
Vucic will not attend the funeral
President Vucic has not confirmed that Monday’s event will be a state funeral, although he assured yesterday that he has done “everything possible for it to proceed as it should.” After excusing his presence due to prior commitments, he explained that he had spoken with the Mladic family, that they had chosen how they wanted the farewell to be, and that they wished for everything to proceed “in a dignified manner.”
“For me, it is a serious mistake by the Serbian government, even if they try to cover it up,” says Mira Milosevich, senior researcher at the Elcano Royal Institute and native of Belgrade, from the Sarajevo Security Conference, who sees how actions like this “certainly do not contribute to regional stability.” “We see that the wounds of the war are still current and that a large part of the population has not changed,” this expert relates. In her view, “paying tribute to a war criminal will further slow Serbia’s path to the European Union and, above all, will further deteriorate the country’s image.”
Goran Simic, professor of Criminal Law in Sarajevo, believes that the honors to the war criminal show that “we have thrown away 30 years of the so-called peace in the former Yugoslavia” and that “the ideologies of evil that were behind all the crimes and catastrophes we experienced in the 90s are not only still alive but are thriving and are waiting to show their heads again.” “These events,” Simic continues, “show us that the war is not over and that the conflict was simply stopped because those who had enough power to prevent us from continuing did so.”
For him, “the European Union insisted on pretending that everything would be fine if we managed to increase our economic level by a few euros per capita, which ultimately turned out to be a huge mistake. What it should do, in my opinion, is insist on overcoming our past because, internally, we do not have the strength necessary to overcome the burden,” he emphasizes. With a comment that sums up what he said: “No increase in the standard of living will change anything, because people do not commit genocides because they are hungry. At the root of genocide, there are other things.”
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