Reporter’s Notebook: General Ratko Mladic’s two faces

In central Banja Luka, a small memorial to Ratko Mladic appeared beside a monument dedicated to people killed in the wars that accompanied Yugoslavia’s breakup. It displayed a photograph of the former military commander in uniform, surrounded by wreaths.

Mladic died on August 27 at 84 while serving a life sentence imposed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Yet the reaction in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority entity, often stood far apart from the international condemnation that followed his death.

“Mladic defended us when we were under attack,” one Banja Luka resident told the Jerusalem Post. “He fought for Serb rights.” Others in the city also called him a hero, showing how sharply his legacy remains contested more than three decades after the Bosnian War.

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Mladic defended us when we were under attack.

The same reverence appeared in Belgrade, where thousands gathered outside a Serbian Orthodox church before his burial. Mourners carried Serbian flags and photographs of Mladic. Free buses brought people from towns in Serbia and Bosnia, while his coffin lay inside the church and his family received condolences.

That public honor exists alongside one of the most serious judicial records to emerge from the Yugoslav wars. In 2017, the ICTY convicted Mladic of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which an estimated 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were killed. The tribunal also convicted him of persecution, extermination, murder, deportation and forcible transfer, as well as crimes linked to the shelling and sniping of civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and the taking of UN personnel hostage. His life sentence was upheld in 2021.

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He fought for Serb rights.