Bosnien-Krieg: Ratko Mladic, der „Schlächter von Srebrenica“, ist tot

Ratko Mladic, the notorious Bosnian Serb general responsible for the "Butcher of Srebrenica," has passed away. This was confirmed by a high-ranking UN representative to the German Press Agency, later reported by the relevant UN organization in The Hague. Mladic died on Thursday in the prison hospital in the Dutch city. The exact cause of death is still under investigation.

For the victims of the war and their families, Mladic represented pure evil. His singular worst crime was the massacre of 8,000 inhabitants of the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, mostly men and young males, in July 1995. For this, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The following tribunal confirmed the sentence in a 2021 appeal, making it legally binding.

Ratko Mladic was the commander of the Bosnian-Serb Army (BSA) during the Bosnian War, a civil war militia that could not have existed without the support of the then leadership in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Mladic himself received his salary from Belgrade and was part of the Serbian General Staff. Along with the political leader of Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, and in accordance with the then Serbian ruler Slobodan Milosevic, he aimed to conquer a large part of Bosnia to join it with Serbia.

Karadzic also serves a life sentence for war crimes. Milosevic died in the Haarlem jail in 2006 before the tribunal could pass judgment on him. As early as the first summer of the war in 1992, Bosnian-Serb militias under Mladic's command massacred thousands of Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats in the east and north of Bosnia. They established detention centers where they held non-Serbian civilians in inhumane conditions and often tortured them.

They operated rape camps for non-Serbian women and girls. They besieged the Bosnian capital Sarajevo for more than three years, with their snipers and artillery targeting the civilian population. In Sarajevo alone, over 11,000 people died, including many children. Mladic's militias displaced hundreds of thousands of non-Serbian civilians to create "ethnically pure" areas where only ethnic Serbs should live.

Mladic was born in Kalinovik, south of Sarajevo, in 1942. At just over 20 years old, he graduated from the Military Academy in Belgrade with distinction. To the Serbs in Serbia and Bosnia, he was always a war hero. Professional Serbian TV programming always presented him as a bully in combat fatigues, always surrounded by ordinary soldiers from any front.

Particularly perfidious: Serbian TV filmed him in July 1995 at Srebrenica, where he distributed chocolate to children and comforted weeping women. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, the displacement of women and children from Srebrenica began in specially prepared buses. Men and young males were driven away by Mladic's militias to be shot in mass in detention halls or football fields.

Mladic was only arrested many years later in May 2011. The EU had made the extradition of all wanted war criminals a condition for the beginning of EU accession talks. Mladic was ultimately captured in Serbia and transferred to The Hague. EU accession talks finally began in 2014. Serbia continues to deny the genocide at Srebrenica.

The official Serbia under President Aleksandar Vucic still denies the genocide of Srebrenica, calling it merely a "war crime" like the ones committed by the other side against Serbs in Bosnia. Mladic is glorified as a war hero and "savior of the Serbs" in Belgrade. During his trial in The Hague, Mladic showed no remorse, mocking and disrupting proceedings in the courtroom.

At the end of his imprisonment, he was severely ill and his last request for release on humanitarian grounds was denied by the court in Belgrade, stating he was no longer transportable and his death was imminent. The court firmly rejected his request.