The death of war criminal Ratko Mladic made headlines across the world. Nothing changed on November 22, 2017 when he was sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to life in prison for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Bosnia more than 10 years earlier. Nothing will change now after his death.
Contrary to what some may think, the world will not become a better place now. I hate writing this sentence, but here it is: Mladic won. He must have died happy, watching the world be overtaken by fascism—a world in which genocide has become normalised.
It is what he fought for, after all. In 2017, after Mladic’s verdict was pronounced, I expressed my fear in an op-ed published by Al Jazeera that his ideas had not been defeated, but would instead spread like a drug-resistant bug, adjusting to different circumstances and times. It is painful to see today that my prediction has come true.
It is clearly visible in the Balkans. In Serbia—a country the European Union is considering accepting as a member — the ruling regime’s survival depends on maintaining an ideology of death and denial. Decades after the war, no real change has been achieved.
The power of President Aleksandar Vucic, a politician seen as an equal by many EU leaders, is cemented by the denial of responsibility for crimes committed in the 1990s in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Then there is Bosnia, a country divided by the Dayton Accords that stopped the shooting and created a divided state that struggles to build a present, much less a future. It is a country where over 100,000 people were killed, and then nothing changed; where genocide denial is an official policy in one part of the country, Republika Srpska; where many of the people who took part in committing war crimes still live freely.
And yet, as much as fascism has maintained its grip on our region, there has also been resistance. We will not mourn for him. We will not glorify him […] Death does not delete verdicts.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
