Mladić's death fails to end Balkan divisions as victims warn his ideology persists

Ratko Mladić died in a prison cell on Thursday, serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. To the world beyond the Balkans, he was the Butcher of Bosnia—a title that somehow still understates the scale of what he orchestrated. As commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, Mladić was responsible for the deaths of roughly 100,000 people. He engineered the ethnic cleansing and genocide at Srebrenica, where at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically killed. During the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo, his forces killed more than 11,000 people, including 2,000 children, through relentless shelling, bombing, and sniper fire. Beyond the dead, somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 women and girls were raped, and 2.7 million people were displaced from their homes. Thirty-one years after the Dayton agreement formally ended the conflict, his death has not closed the wound—it has only exposed how differently the Balkans still remembers him.

Džemil Hodžić was twelve years old when his sixteen-year-old brother Amel was shot by a sniper while playing tennis in Sarajevo in May 1995. Now forty-three and founder of the Sniper Alley photo project, Hodžić recalls how Mladić's name carried weight even for children trapped in the siege. "Everyone knew him and his name," Hodžić told the Guardian. "We were very well aware that he was responsible for our situation and the suffering we were going through." The children of Sarajevo knew the sound of incoming fire, the sight of schools under bombardment, the loss of friends and family members. They knew who gave the orders.

Zoran Kusovać, a Croatian journalist who covered the Balkan wars and met Mladić multiple times, remembers standing with him on a mountain plateau overlooking Sarajevo, where Bosnian Serb artillery was positioned. Mladić gestured toward the city below and told him: "Look, I have Sarajevo in the palm of my hand. I can either destroy it or take it whenever I want." Kusovać describes a man who was a bully, someone whose superiors lacked the courage to challenge him. But Mladić was also methodical. He kept detailed records of his actions, writing everything down with the confidence of someone who believed accountability would never find him.

In Serbia and among Bosnian Serbs, however, a different narrative has always existed. To them, Mladić was a defender, a man fighting for a mythical Greater Serbia who was betrayed by international courts and misunderstood by a world biased against Serbs. On Thursday, the Serbian government in Belgrade announced that Mladić—who was either eighty-three or eighty-four at the time of his death, depending on which official account you believe—would receive a military and state funeral with full honors. Ultranationalist politician Vojislav Šešelj told journalists that Mladić had "fought against those villains at The Hague for a long time," refusing to die when they expected him to. Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb separatist leader, declared that "Mladić was respected by the Serbian people. As a commander he stood to defend Serbs."

The United Nations secretary general's office issued a statement urging those in power to "refrain from denying the seriousness of the crimes," a warning that felt necessary precisely because denial and glorification were already underway. Emir Suljagić, director of the Srebrenica Memorial and one of only a handful of men to escape the enclave before the massacre, offered a stark perspective: "The people he sent to their deaths never had the chance to grow old. That is the only fact about his death that matters to me." Suljagić stressed that Mladić's death changes nothing about what happened. The harder work remains ahead—preventing the truth from being erased, stopping genocide denial, ensuring that memory survives the man.

Suljagić has long pointed out that Mladić did not act alone. "When are we going to deal with the people who did his bidding?" he asked in 2021. "Everyone knows who they are." Those people, he noted, are still free, still walking through Bosnian towns as if their hands were clean. Their continued freedom means that Bosnian people still do not feel entirely safe. Hodžić echoed this warning: "Sadly, there are people who consider Mladić a hero and celebrate his life and his atrocities. The butcher may be gone, but unfortunately his legacy is still there." He described a persistent ideology, a sense among some that the work Mladić began remains unfinished. "His ideas and ideals are not dead," Hodžić said. "We are witnessing this on a daily basis. It is the glorification of a monster." The question now is not whether Mladić will be remembered, but how—and whether the Balkans can move forward when such fundamentally different versions of the past continue to divide them.