Panos Kammenos’s Shameful Eulogy for the Convicted War Criminal Ratko Mladic

In a display of moral bankruptcy that should leave every decent Greek, European, and human being recoiling, former Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos took to social media to bid farewell to Ratko Mladić—the Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—as if mourning a beloved comrade rather than a mass murderer.

Calling him “my friend General Mladić,” an “Orthodox Patriot” who was “never a ‘butcher,’” who “left standing and proud” and “did not kneel,” Kammenos framed the death of this man as some kind of noble exit from a world that supposedly “took revenge until the end.” This is not mere eccentricity or nationalist posturing.

It is a deliberate, public rehabilitation of one of the most notorious war criminals of the late 20th century, a man whose forces carried out the systematic slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995—the worst atrocity on European soil since the Holocaust—and who oversaw the terror campaign that turned Sarajevo into a city of snipers, shelling, and civilian death for nearly four years.

Mladić was no misunderstood general fighting for Orthodoxy or “patriotism.” He was the commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, a central participant in joint criminal enterprises aimed at permanently removing Bosnian Muslims and Croats from Serb-claimed territory through murder, extermination, persecution, deportation, and forcible transfer.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him in 2017 of genocide in Srebrenica, among other charges; the appeals chamber upheld the life sentence in 2021. His forces separated women and children from men and boys, then executed the latter en masse—dumping bodies in mass graves, later reburying them in secondary sites to conceal the crime. The siege of Sarajevo alone killed more than 11,000 people, many of them civilians deliberately targeted to spread terror.

To call this man “never a butcher” is to spit on the graves of the victims, on the survivors who still search for remains, and on the very concept of historical truth. The nickname “Butcher of Bosnia” was not invented by propaganda; it was earned through documented, adjudicated acts of industrial-scale cruelty. Kammenos’s attempt to rebrand him as an upright Orthodox hero who died with dignity is the language of denialists and ethno-nationalist fantasists who treat international justice as a conspiracy against their preferred side.

Kammenos is not some fringe keyboard warrior. He is a former Minister of National Defence of Greece, founder of the Independent Greeks party, a man who held high office in a NATO and EU member state. That a figure with that resume feels free to publicly eulogize a genocidaire as a personal friend and moral exemplar reveals a deeper rot: the casual normalization of Balkan wartime revisionism in certain political circles that romanticize “Orthodox solidarity” while ignoring the piles of corpses produced by it. Shared religion does not wash away the blood of Srebrenica. Patriotism that requires the erasure of genocide is not patriotism; it is tribal thuggery dressed up in icons and slogans.

This is not about collective guilt of Serbs. It is about one man’s individual, proven responsibility for some of the worst crimes of our time—and another man’s choice to celebrate him. When a former Greek defense minister chooses to honor the architect of Srebrenica while the bodies are still being identified and the survivors still live with the trauma, he is telling the world that for him, ethnic kinship and anti-Western grievance outweigh the most basic standards of humanity and international law.

Kammenos’s post is not an act of courage or principle. It is an act of profound disrespect—to the dead, to the living victims, to the rule of law, and to Greece itself. A country that has known occupation, famine, and civil conflict should understand better than most the difference between genuine patriotism and the glorification of butchers. Instead, one of its former senior officials has chosen the latter. That choice deserves nothing but contempt.