Thousands line up to bid farewell to war criminal who killed thousands: ‘No place in an EU candidate country’

Thousands gathered at St. Luka Church in Belgrade to file past the coffin of Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide and war crimes. He is being buried in the Serbian capital at state expense.

The funeral has triggered an international backlash. Marta Kos, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, canceled a planned visit to Serbia, saying that honoring Mladic’s death was incompatible with the values underpinning the country’s path toward EU membership.

“Any glorification of war criminals, denial of genocide and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries,” an EU spokesperson said in a statement cited by AFP.

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Honoring his death is incompatible with the values that the EU path is built on.

Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” died on August 27 at the age of 84 after spending his final 15 years in prison. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague convicted him in 2017 of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically killed by Mladic’s Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995. The massacre took place in an area officially designated a UN-protected zone. During the 1992-1995 Bosnia war, about 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million were forced to flee.

For many Serbian nationalists, however, Mladic remains a hero. People attending the funeral wore shirts praising him, while Serbian flags and banners honoring him appeared around the area. Serbia’s EU application has stalled amid criticism over democratic decline and President Aleksandar Vucic’s refusal to join international sanctions against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

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Any glorification of war criminals, denial of genocide and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries.