Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb Military Chief Convicted of Genocide, Dies at 84

Ratko Mladic, the former military leader of Bosnian Serbs who was convicted of genocide, has died at the age of 84. The announcement of his death was made by Serbian public television on Thursday.

Mladic had been serving a life sentence at a United Nations detention unit in The Hague. He had been seriously ill for months, and his passing occurred just days after his family and the Serbian government's request for him to be transferred to a military hospital in Belgrade for treatment was denied by the UN Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals.

The former general led the Bosnian Serb forces during the 1992-1995 intercommunal war. In 2017, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. His conviction was upheld on appeal in 2021. Among the most egregious crimes he was found responsible for was the massacre of approximately 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.

Mladic was apprehended in Serbia in 2011, after being a fugitive for sixteen years. Despite his convictions, he remains a figure glorified by some Serbian political leaders and Bosnian Serbs. His son, Darko Mladic, had recently denounced what he called a "silent assassination" of his father, claiming that prison doctors had "entirely stopped the care."

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C’est un assassinat silencieux de mon père. [...] les médecins du centre pénitentiaire avaient «entièrement arrêté les soins».