Ratko Mladić: “Butcher of Srebrenica” is dead

War criminal Ratko Mladic

The “Butcher of Srebrenica” is dead

He was one of the main perpetrators of atrocities in the Bosnian War and was known as the “Butcher of the Balkans”. Now the war criminal Ratko Mladić is said to have died.

Former Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of war crimes, is dead. This was confirmed by a high-ranking UN representative to the German Press Agency. A statement from the responsible UN organization in The Hague later said that Mladić died in the prison hospital that Thursday. Mladić was serving his life sentence in the international prison in the Dutch city. The exact cause of death is still under investigation.

For the victims of the war and their families, the “Butcher of Srebrenica” represented evil par excellence. His single worst crime was the massacre of 8,000 residents of the eastern Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica, mostly men and young males, in July 1995. For this he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the UN Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. In 2021, the successor tribunal confirmed the verdict in the appeal process, making it legally binding.

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Ratko Mladić was the commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb Army (BSA) during the Bosnian War. This was a civil war militia that would not have existed without the support of the leadership at the time in the Serbian capital Belgrade. Mladić himself received his pay from Belgrade and was a member of the Serbian General Staff. Together with the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, and in the spirit of the then Serbian ruler Slobodan Milošević, he wanted to conquer the larger part of Bosnia in order to acquire the area Serbia to connect. Karadžić is also serving a life sentence in prison for war crimes. Milosevic died in the remand prison in The Hague in 2006 before the tribunal could make a verdict on him.

Already in the first summer of the war in 1992, the Bosnian Serb militias under the command of Mladić massacred thousands of Muslims (Bosniaks) and Croats in the east and north of Bosnia. They set up prison camps where they held non-Serb civilians in inhumane conditions and often tortured them to death. They ran rape camps for non-Serb women and girls. For more than three years they besieged the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, where their snipers and artillerymen hunted the civilian population. More than 11,000 people died there alone, including many children. Mladić’s militias displaced hundreds of thousands of non-Serb civilians to create “ethnically pure” areas where only ethnic Serbs would live.