The ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ is dead – but divisions live on in the Balkans
Serbia’s former president Boris Tadić got it right. Ratko Mladić was a “stain” – and his death in custody in The Hague, where he was serving a life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity, will not cleanse Bosnia and Herzegovina or Serbia of his toxic legacy. The former Bosnian-Serb general isn’t the only murderous figure from the past lionised as a national champion in the Western Balkans. The obsession of some prominent figures with presenting villains as heroes is a significant obstacle to the region’s reconciliation and progress.
When Mladić was arrested in 2011, Serbia’s then president, Tadić, was rather more optimistic. As far as he was concerned, Mladić’s capture drew a line under a turbulent period of history; he hoped that it would allow his country and its people to move on. “We have lifted the stain from Serbia and from Serbs, wherever they live,” Tadić declared, adding that the arrest would end a “difficult period in our history”.
But the assumption that everything would be different after the arrest of the “Butcher of Bosnia” didn’t survive contact with realpolitik, Western Balkans-style. Rather than embracing the idea that Serbia and its people could distance themselves from the horrific deeds of Mladić and the other war criminals convicted at The Hague, some politicians continued to push the idea that any Serb fighter was, by definition, a national hero – and that Mladić was the most heroic of the lot.
On the day of the former general’s death, Aleksandar Vulin, who has held multiple ministerial posts in Serbian governments over the past 14 years, declared that Serbia should honour him with a state funeral and a day of mourning. “From Gavrilo Princip to Ratko Mladić, the best Serbs are killed while tied up,” he wrote in a media statement.
Governments have often indulged Vulin’s outrageous pronouncements, largely because they help to make them look reasonable by comparison. But there are plenty of otherwise sensible politicians who have spoken about Mladić in sympathetic terms too. Days before the former general’s death, President Aleksandar Vucić said that it was hard to understand why Mladić had not been allowed to return home to see out his final days. Around the same time, justice minister Nenad Vujić submitted a formal request to The Hague for Mladić to be released on “humanitarian” grounds. Vujić later confirmed that the convicted war criminal would “receive all the military and state honours to which he is entitled”.
It would be a mistake to think that this sort of thing only happens in Serbia. Earlier this month, Croatia buried the remains of more than 500 Nazi collaborators who were summarily executed by Partizan forces at the end of the Second World War. There was no word of the crimes that they – or the Nazi-allied Croat nationalist Ustasa movement – had committed. Instead, ministers talked about offences committed by “totalitarian regimes”, meaning Tito’s Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, planes arriving at Zagreb land at Franjo Tudjman Airport, named after the president who steered Croatia to independence in the 1990s but who would have faced war crimes charges at The Hague had he not died in 1999.
In Kosovo, special clocks in city centres are counting down towards another war crimes decision. In mid-September, a court in The Hague will deliver its verdict in the trial of former president Hashim Thaci. In Kosovo, there’s little mention of the charges – crimes against humanity for overseeing murder, torture and illegal detention in the late 1990s – or the scores of victims. Instead, there’s outrage that a hero of Kosovo’s struggle for independence should have been brought to trial in a “biased court”. Naturally, this narrative is pushed by Thaci’s PDK party, which is currently in opposition.
And that’s the nub of the problem. Across the Western Balkans, ethno-nationalist politicians remain in power. They have little interest in regional reconciliation – in fact, they prefer to keep resentment bubbling away so they can divide, rule and, in many cases, profit. The posthumous veneration of Ratko Mladić is just the latest (and possibly most egregious) example. Unless and until the countries of the Western Balkans can shake off the culture of denial and be honest about the crimes of the past, little will change. That suits many political leaders just fine. Perhaps, in time, the people will feel otherwise.
