Ratko Mladic burial highlights divisive legacy

Ratko Mladic is due to be buried in Belgrade on Monday, with thousands expected to honour the convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal despite his life sentence for atrocities committed during the war in Bosnia.

Mladic spent his final years serving a life sentence in The Hague. The tribunal said the crimes were among the most heinous known to humankind. They included the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, which the court ruled was genocide orchestrated by Mladic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic.

His legacy remains deeply divisive in Serbia and in the Serb-majority entity in Bosnia, where some Serbs still view him as a hero. His casket was welcomed to Belgrade with military honours after being flown on a government jet draped in flags and driven in a motorcade into the capital.

Darko Mladic, his son, said Friday at a press conference with Serbia's justice minister that he was proud of his father's role.

Mladic presented himself as a defender of Serbs. At his appeal hearing in 2020, he said fate had put him in a position to defend his country against Western powers. But he oversaw the siege of Sarajevo for more than three years, during which snipers and artillery killed thousands of civilians.

He formed part of a Serb nationalist leadership with Karadzic and former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic during the wars that followed Yugoslavia's breakup. Mladic was dismissed after being indicted in 1995 but avoided arrest for 16 years. He was arrested in May 2011 at his cousin's country house in northern Serbia.

Mladic was born in Kalinovik in eastern Bosnia. Most accounts say he was born in 1942, while he told the tribunal he was born in 1943. He trained as a soldier in Belgrade in the early 1960s and rose to command Bosnian Serb forces in the war.

In Banja Luka, thousands attended vigils after his death. In Srebrenica, Sehida Abdurahmanovic, who lost her brother in the massacre, said history would remember him as a war criminal.