Ratko Mladić: the war criminal who became a martyr for Bosnian Serbs

To most of the world, he was the “Butcher of Bosnia”. A brutal murderer who wanted to eradicate Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats in pursuit of an ethnically pure “Greater Serbia”.

Ratko Mladić was the commander of the Bosnian Serb military during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. He orchestrated the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, which resulted in the deaths of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces.

Mladić died in The Hague in late August while serving a life sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was laid to rest this week in Serbia with full military honours, drawing thousands of mourners. The scenes angered the families of the victims of his crimes, and the European Union.

Olivera Simic was 19 years old when the war broke out and she was forced to flee the country.

Now an international law professor at Griffith University in Australia, she told The Conversation Weekly podcast that she’s found it difficult to see the public mourning over the death of a convicted war criminal.

I think I spent all my life trying to understand what really happened back then. People often think if you survive war, you know everything about war and you must know why it happened and what happened. But that’s not necessarily true for most of us.

Simic said that for many Serbs and Bosnian Serbs, Mladić is still seen as a martyr who defended the Serbian people during the war.

What concerns me the most is the normalisation of these images [for] young people who were born after the war.

This is what they are exposed to […] not the evidence [that was] presented at his trial, but rather through this pop culture of Mladić as a war hero.

More than three decades after the conflict, Simic said Mladić’s death is reopening old wounds in Bosnia and Herzegovina and showing how divided it remains.

Everyone talks about their own […] victimhood. But there is little reckoning and dealing with the past when it comes to owning your own responsibility and accountability for some things that happened in the 1990s.

That also needs to happen if we are going to move on.

Disclosure statement & credits

Olivera Simic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this podcast, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Newsclips in this episode from CNN, 7News and France24.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Isabella Podwinski and Justin Bergman. Mixing by Lloyd Barrett and theme music by Neeta Sarl.