The state funeral of Ratko Mladić proves that the regime has never renounced the policy of genocide
The Regional Academy for Democratic Development assesses that the announcement by the Minister of Justice in the Government of the Republic of Serbia that convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić will be buried with the highest state honors is scandalous and shameful. His assessment that “General Mladić is a general” and that “the protocols are known” proves once again that this regime has never given up on and ceased to support the ideology of genocide, war, and death that Ratko Mladić put into practice.
Ratko Mladić exterminated entire ethnic groups, ordered the murders and executions of children, women, and civilians, and organized the throwing of their bodies into mass graves, followed by their exhumation, extraction, and scattering across the country. He was convicted of genocide and war crimes, and was the greatest butcher on European soil since the Second World War. The mere fact that the military has never distanced itself from him, has not condemned his crimes, and has not stripped him of his general’s rank is scandalous in itself. However, the fact that the regime in Serbia uses this decision of the military as an excuse to organize an honorary funeral for him, citing some sort of protocols, is problematic on a much higher level and actually represents the final phase of the crimes commanded by Mladić.
The massive state, institutional, and diplomatic concern for his health, the continuous lamentations and pleas for his early release from a life sentence, to allow him to die in his own country, and to guarantee him a dignity before death that the victims of his crimes never had, represent regime support and the paying of respects to everything he did, to all the crimes he committed, and, of course, to the politics that led to it. Organizing a heroic send-off is only the crown of all this.
This is brutal proof that the regime in Serbia has never renounced the policy of genocide, hatred, and persecution, and that it has continued to advocate the very same criminal policy whose loudest proponents they were during the 1990s. All the resources that have been invested for years into the protection and rehabilitation of the perpetrator of the Srebrenica genocide and mass crimes throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina are clear proof that the state leadership not only does not want to face the past, but is proud of that past and actively builds its political platform upon it.
A state funeral and the rendering of military honors to a criminal represents the renewed killing of thousands of innocent victims and the trampling of their families’ dignity. With such moves, the regime takes the entire society and all citizens as hostages to its own criminal ideology, tying the burden of genocide around their necks and permanently excluding Serbia from the community of civilized European nations. The deliberate and state-sponsored celebration of Mladić is a direct blow to any attempt at lasting reconciliation and normalization of relations in the region.
As long as the state apparatus celebrates butchers, child murderers, and criminals as heroes, this society will remain trapped in hatred, without any chance for genuine democratic development.
Regional Academy for Democratic Development
Novi Sad, August 28, 2026
