By granting Ratko Mladić a state funeral, Serbia has turned a grave into a shrine
Mladic’s funeral on 7 September (Associated Press/Alamy)
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There is a reason some of history’s most notorious criminals have no grave.
After Adolf Eichmann was executed in Israel in 1962, his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea beyond Israeli waters. Osama bin Laden, too, was buried at sea. The men and their crimes were entirely different, but the outcome was the same: neither had a grave that could become a place of pilgrimage. Serbia has chosen another course with the convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić.
Mladić died on 27 August, imprisoned in The Hague for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – judgments reached by an international tribunal and upheld on appeal.
Yet his return to Serbia resembled the homecoming of a national hero. The government sent an aircraft for his remains. Soldiers carried his flag-draped coffin. A commemoration was held at an official army venue. Thousands attended his funeral, including government ministers, and leaders from Bosnian entity of Republika Srpska (RS). Patriarch Porfirije, head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, conducted the service. These were choices which carry meaning.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Mladić guilty of the campaign to expel non-Serbs from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory: sniping and shelling that terrorised Sarajevo’s civilians for 1,425 days; the Srebrenica genocide; and chaining UN personnel to bridges, ammunition bunkers and radar stations to deter Nato’s 1995 air strikes.
Yet the Serbian government chose to receive this man as a hero.
Mladić’s family had every right to mourn him privately. But a state-sponsored funeral is not an act of private grief: it is one of public honour. And it should therefore reflect a state’s moral and legal responsibility to condemn atrocities rather than confer honour on those who committed them.
Thirty-one years after the Srebrenica massacre, Serbia is sending a clear signal to survivors that international judgments may be formally acknowledged while being symbolically repudiated. Serbia still awaits its Willy Brandt moment, which would free a new generation from defending crimes they did not commit. Instead, they are beckoning a new generation to celebrate Mladić as a defender of the nation, imposing upon them collective guilt by rebinding the state to some of Europe’s gravest crimes since 1945.
Mladić’s family had every right to mourn him privately. But a state-sponsored funeral is not an act of private grief: it is one of public honour
This matters beyond Serbia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, genocide denial and glorification of convicted war criminals continue to poison inter-communal relations and fuel division. Belgrade’s spectacle reverberates across a region where peace was achieved but reconciliation remains incomplete.
It also poses a question for Brussels, Washington and London. Serbia has been an EU candidate since 2012, but membership requires more than markets and negotiating chapters – it requires accepting a political order built on law, accountability and human dignity.
European leaders were right to call the images shocking; and our government was right to summon Serbia’s Chargé d’Affaires.
But condemnation should be backed by policy changes and real consequences. The EU should make clear that Serbia cannot advance toward membership while its institutions attempt to sanitise a man convicted of genocide. Washington and London should reintroduce and expand targeted sanctions against RS officials who celebrate war criminals, deny genocide or undermine the Dayton Agreement – and against Serbian officials who turned Mladić’s funeral into state-sponsored revisionism. Countries committed to Expo 2027 in Belgrade, including the UK, should reconsider participation. We cannot in good faith proceed – particularly given the theme, “Play for Humanity”, so grossly contrasts with the glorification of a war criminal.
The danger is not that Mladić has a grave – it is that it may become a shrine. Eichmann and bin Laden were denied graves because societies recognise the power of symbols: burials can determine history.
We know what Mladić did; courts established that beyond doubt. The question is what his funeral tells us about the Serbia today, and about us too – our willingness to defend the values we claim to uphold. If our response is condemnation followed by business as usual, the lesson will be clear: even genocide can be relativised with enough time and political convenience.
Baroness Helic is a Conservative peer
