In Serbia, this divide was further reinforced by the stance of pro-government media outlets, which glorified Mladic’s wartime role while emphasising efforts by the Serbian authorities to secure his release and bring him to Belgrade when he was seriously ill and about to die. In contrast, some opposition politicians have spoken of his death as the passing of a convicted war criminal.
When he died, 84-year-old Mladic was serving a life sentence for committing genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has suffered severe health problems for several years and was being treated by medics at the UN Detention Unit.
Serbian pro-government media amplified claims by nationalist politicians that Mladic was “killed” by the UN court in The Hague because he was not brought to Belgrade for medical care, as his lawyers had repeatedly requested.
“From Gavrilo Princip to Ratko Mladic, the best Serbs are killed while bound,” declared Aleksandar Vulin, former Serbian Interior Minister and ex-head of the Security Intelligence Agency.
Vulin argued that “the Serbian state owes convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic a state and military funeral, as well as a day of mourning”, Bosnian news agency SRNA reported.
Vojislav Seselj, leader of the far-right Serbian Radical Party, also convicted of wartime crimes by the UN court, said that Mladic had long been battling a serious illness and the Hague “villains” had not provided him with proper medical treatment for several years.
Serbia’s public broadcaster RTS and pro-government media outlets highlighted how Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic had appealed to the court the previous week to release Mladic and allow him to come to Serbia.
“I do not understand why they would not allow someone to spend their final days outside a prison cell. But am I particularly surprised? No,” Vucic said at the time, as reported by Informer, one of Serbia’s main pro-government tabloids.
Informer’s high-profile editor-in-chief, Dragan Vucicevic, said that “the real news today should not be that Ratko Mladic has died, but that he was killed in The Hague Tribunal”.
“That is a terrorist organisation whose aim is to convict Serbs of genocide, and now it has killed a general,” Vucicevic said.
Milorad Dodik, leader of the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, SNSD and former president of Bosnia’s Serb-dominated Republika Srpska entity, also described Mladic’s death as murder.
“This really is a killing, because everything pointed to his poor state of health, and this was an organised approach that was intended to lead to a fatal outcome,” Dodik said, according to Republika Srpska’s public broadcaster RTRS.
No mourning from survivors