On 7 September 2026, thousands gathered in Belgrade for the funeral of Ratko Mladić. The former Bosnian Serb general, convicted by the UN tribunal of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, received a send-off with military pomp, church blessing, and public reverence. His coffin, draped in Serbian flags and carrying his military cap and sword, was escorted by soldiers.
The Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Porfirije, declared that Mladić’s name would remain “deeply etched in the memory and prayers of the majority of our Serbian Orthodox people, who feel and nurture a deep sense of gratitude towards him.” A three-volley salute marked the burial. Ministers attended. The president’s son attended. Russia’s ambassador attended. Football fans had already displayed his image and chanted his name.
This was not a quiet private burial. It was a public act of honour for the extremist known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”—the commander responsible for the siege of Sarajevo that killed more than 10,000 civilians and for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which around 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered after the UN-designated safe area fell.
Mladić’s forces filmed themselves handing out sweets to children before rounding up and killing the men. He called Srebrenica a “gift” to the Serb people. He died in The Hague while serving a life sentence. Serbia flew his remains home on a government plane, carried by uniformed soldiers.
The European Union’s response was immediate and clear. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos cancelled a planned visit. “The return of his remains to Belgrade reminds Europe of the darkest pages in our recent history,” she said. “The glorification surrounding [Mladić’s] death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.
That path requires confronting the past, genuine reconciliation and respecting the victims of war crimes.” An EU spokesperson added that any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism “contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries.”
Serbia has been negotiating EU accession since 2014. The process has long been stalled. This funeral did not create the problem; it revealed it in the starkest possible terms. A candidate country that treats a convicted genocidaire as a national hero is not merely failing a political checklist. It is rejecting the core of what membership is supposed to mean: the rule of law, accountability for mass atrocity, and a shared European understanding that some crimes place their perpetrators beyond honour.
Justice is not an abstract European export. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia existed precisely because the alternative—victors’ justice or no justice at all—had failed so catastrophically in the 20th century. Mladić was tried, convicted and imprisoned.
That process is now treated in significant parts of Serbian public life as illegitimate. When the head of the national church expresses “deep gratitude” for the man who ordered the slaughter at Srebrenica, and when government ministers and the president’s family appear at the rites, the signal is unmistakable: the verdict is rejected, the victims are secondary, and the criminal is reclaimed as protector.
Liberty and democratic future are not advanced by this either. Serbia’s politics under Aleksandar Vučić has long balanced between Moscow and Brussels, ultra-nationalist mobilisation and technocratic EU talk. The funeral fits a pattern in which wartime figures and Greater Serbia mythology remain usable political currency.
Snap elections have been announced; the ruling party has nominated Vučić for the prime minister’s post. The timing of the funeral and the political calendar may or may not have been coordinated, but the atmosphere of national grievance and historical revisionism is useful to those who prefer controlled nationalism to the messy demands of genuine accountability and institutional reform.
To the West and to the European project, this is not a minor cultural disagreement. It is a choice. Countries that join the EU are expected to internalise certain limits: you do not honour those who organised the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War. You do not fly their coffins home on state aircraft under military escort and bury them with rifle salutes while your church leaders praise them. You do not treat genocide convictions as foreign impositions to be quietly reversed in public memory.
Serbia is of course free to make that choice. No one can force a society to confront its past if it prefers myth. But choices have consequences. The path toward the European Union, toward deeper integration with liberal democracies, toward a politics grounded in justice rather than selective memory, becomes narrower with every such act of glorification. The future that many Serbs say they want—membership, investment, mobility, institutional modernity—requires a different relationship to 1995. Honouring the architect of Srebrenica is the opposite of that relationship.
The victims of Srebrenica and Sarajevo do not get a second chance at life. The families who still search for remains do not get the comfort of seeing the perpetrator repudiated by the society that once protected him. What they get instead is the sight of thousands in Belgrade treating the “Butcher of Bosnia” as a hero, while Europe looks on and draws the only conclusion available: a country that cannot bury this past without celebrating it is not yet ready for the future it claims to seek. In the eyes of the West, the EU, and the principles of justice and liberty that are supposed to underwrite European order, that is a form of political death—self-inflicted, public, and entirely avoidable.
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