Crowds turn out as war criminal Mladic is buried with military honours

Thousands turned out for the funeral of Ratko Mladic (AP Photo)

Ratko Mladic was buried on Monday with military honours and crowds attending as Serbia defied European Union warnings against allowing public homage to the man found guilty of the continent’s first case of genocide since the Second World War.

Thousands of mourners started arriving early at the small Serbian Orthodox Church of St Luke in Belgrade to honour Mladic as his body lay in state.

Mladic is still viewed as a hero by many Serbs.

His military officer’s cap and sabre rested on the coffin, which was flanked by men in fatigues.

The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porfirije, led the funeral service while Serbian army soldiers carried Mladic’s flag-draped coffin at the cemetery as mourners clapped and a military orchestra played. Pro-government media broadcast the ceremony live.

Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik and the Russian ambassador in Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, were among those present at the funeral.

Mladic died aged 84 on August 27 in The Hague, Netherlands, where he was serving a life sentence for war crimes.

He was sentenced in 2017 for orchestrating the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995; the years-long siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo; and other war crimes, including setting up concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers.

Since Mladic died, his nationalist admirers have held vigils, painted a series of murals in Belgrade with his image and lit flares in his honour.

On Sunday evening, soccer fans displayed a huge image of Mladic and chanted his name at a match in Belgrade.

In Bosnia, the Mothers of Srebrenica group that gathers relatives of the victims, urged the EU to react, saying that Mladic’s funeral “threatens to become the biggest fascist gathering in Europe in the last 70 years”.

“The glorification of genocide is not honour, it’s a shame,” they said on X.

A UN “safe haven” for Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Srebrenica ended up being overrun by Serbs who forced men and boys to strip, killed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.

The EU’s foreign service said in a statement 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”.

“We are standing in solidarity with all victims, survivors and their families who suffered from war crimes in countries of former Yugoslavia,” the statement added.

Populist President Aleksandar Vucic, a former extreme nationalist who supported Serbia’s expansionist policies during the war, described the funeral as an “emotional outpouring” that “has nothing to do” with whether the Serbian government approved it or not.

Serbia is a candidate nation for European Union membership and has faced strong criticism for honouring Mladic after his death.