Mladic, dubbed the "Butcher of the Balkans", died last Thursday at 84 while serving a life sentence in The Hague for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of roughly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, along with other atrocities committed during the Bosnian war.
Monday's funeral at Belgrade's Topcider cemetery was staged with full military honors: soldiers carried his flag-draped coffin, and Patriarch Porfirije, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, presided over the service, at one point referring to Mladic as "our brother, the general".
Serbia's ministers of defense, justice, culture and public investment attended, alongside numerous lawmakers from the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, Russia's ambassador to Serbia, and former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik. President Aleksandar Vucic stayed away, though his son Danilo was present. The family officially organized the funeral, but Mladic's body had arrived in Belgrade earlier aboard a government aircraft, accompanied by his son and Serbia's justice minister.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa said in a joint statement posted to X that the officials' presence "gives rise to deep sorrow" and pointed to "a lack of readiness to confront a dark chapter of Europe's recent history". The show of state support, they added, contradicts the values underlying Serbia's bid to join the EU. Both leaders said they stood with victims of crimes committed throughout the former Yugoslavia.
The Commission stopped short of formally condemning the funeral itself, noting it lacked official state honors. But EU enlargement commissioner Marta Kos scrapped a planned visit to Belgrade on Friday over what she called the glorification of a war criminal, saying the return of Mladic's remains to the city reopened Europe's darkest historical wounds. Officials elsewhere in the Balkans echoed that criticism.
Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted Mladic in 2017 of genocide, persecution and forced displacement across Bosnia and Herzegovina, terrorizing civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and holding U.N. peacekeepers hostage — a verdict upheld on appeal in 2021. He evaded capture for nearly 16 years before his arrest in Serbia in May 2011 and was handed over to the tribunal six days later.
Family members and officials in Serbia and Republika Srpska had pushed for weeks to have the ailing Mladic transferred to Belgrade before his death; those requests were repeatedly turned down. His funeral's scale — the military honors, the ministerial turnout, the presence of Russia's ambassador and Republika Srpska leadership — has become a fresh flashpoint in Serbia's already strained relationship with Brussels.
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Source: PAP, Polish Radio