Srebrenica war criminal Ratko Mladić dies in The Hague

Ratko Mladić, a former Bosnian Serb general, has passed away at the age of 84, according to reports. The man known as the "Butcher of Bosnia" served a life sentence for his involvement in the Bosnian war that took place between 1992 and 1995. He had been struggling with poor health in recent years and had been admitted to the hospital on multiple occasions. Mladić was apprehended in 2011 and incarcerated at a UN detention facility.

One of the most notorious events in his military career was the massacre that took place in Srebrenica in 1995. Over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed, marking it as one of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War 2. Mladić's nationalist Serb forces had subjected the besieged capital, Sarajevo, to constant bombardment using various weapons, resulting in the deaths of around 10,000 people during the conflict.

In July 1995, bodies of the victims were buried in mass graves over the course of four days. Subsequently, some of the remains were exhumed and relocated to remote mountain areas to cover up the evidence of the killings. The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) determined that the purpose behind these killings was to carry out "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs to create more territory for a Greater Serbia.

Mladić, along with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were found guilty of participating in a criminal conspiracy to execute this plan. During a 2014 hearing, Mladić refused to recognize the ICTY's authority, stating, "I do not recognize this court." When he was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017, Mladić shouted, "This is all lies, you are all liars!"