Thousands attend funeral of war criminal Mladic in Serbia

Misha Savic, Bloomberg News on Sep 7, 2026

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BELGRADE, Serbia — Thousands of people in Serbia attended the funeral of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander convicted of war crimes, while the European Union warned against glorifying him.

A long procession followed Mladic’s coffin from a church to a cemetery in the capital Belgrade, where the authorities of President Aleksandar Vucic provided security but refrained from giving a state funeral.

Praise for war criminals and genocide denial “contradicts fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or EU candidate countries,” the bloc’s foreign affairs spokesperson said in a statement on Monday. The Balkan nation has been an EU candidate for more than a decade, but its membership bid has stalled in recent years.

Mladic, the former military commander known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” died last week while serving a life sentence in The Hague, Netherlands. The former Yugoslav army general was convicted for crimes against humanity and genocide during the 1990s war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ethnic fighting left more than 100,000 dead and more than 2 million people displaced.

Many Serbs in Serbia and in Bosnia still see Mladic as their protector and a hero, while much of the rest of former Yugoslavia remembers him as the man who orchestrated the siege of Sarajevo and the killing of more than 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica.

Vucic didn’t show up at the funeral, citing previous commitments. However, a few other government officials appeared at the event, as did the president’s son.

The president and his ruling Progressive Party are gearing up for early elections, expected to take place next month, after almost two years of intense anti-government protests.

Media in Bosnia reported outrage among Bosnia’s Muslim majority that Mladic was given a hero’s sendoff. Andrej Plenkovic, prime minister of Croatia whose independence from Yugoslavia was also marked by war, warned that Serbs praising the disgraced army general were “closing the doors of the European Union to themselves.”