Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb military commander who was the architect of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War, has died aged 84, according to Serbian state media. The war criminal was serving a life sentence at The Hague for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. The fact [that he’s dead] does not change much.
It doesn’t bring back the dead. It doesn’t erase the mass graves. It doesn’t alter the verdicts.
It doesn’t turn a criminal into a historical figure,” Emir Suljagić, the head of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, posted on X. The news was also reported by , citing a U.N. official. Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mladić led the Bosnian Serb army, which turned eastern Bosnia into the site of the worst crimes during the Yugoslav disintegration wars of the 1990s.
Thousands of people, mainly Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats, were murdered, tortured and displaced by his armed forces with the goal of creating an ethnically pure territory for Serbs. Mladić went into hiding after the end of the Bosnian War in 1995 and remained a fugitive for nearly 16 years. He was arrested by Serbian authorities in 2011 and extradited to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, which sentenced him to life in prison in 2017.
In recent years, Mladić had repeatedly sought to have his life sentence overturned, citing his advanced age and deteriorating health. The court rejected his appeals as recently as Aug. 20, and he remained at the UN detention facility until his death.
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