The Death of Mladić Won’t End His War

Ratko Mladić, commander of the Army of Republika Srpska during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has died in The Hague as a convicted war criminal serving a life sentence for genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. For readers outside the former Yugoslavia, to whom his name may mean little more than fading television footage from the 1990s, it is worth stating plainly who he was. The army under his command kept Sarajevo under artillery and sniper fire for years, and in July 1995, after the fall of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in a crime that an international court ruled to be genocide. Mladić evaded arrest for years, was captured in Serbia in 2011, convicted in 2017, and had his conviction upheld on appeal in 2021. He therefore died after an international court had established his personal responsibility for crimes that left thousands dead and reshaped entire communities for generations.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. His death alters none of those facts, nor can it return a single day to the people who survived the crimes for which he was convicted. In Srebrenica, families spent years searching for the remains of their loved ones because victims’ bodies had been moved from one mass grave to another in an effort to conceal the crime; some were able to bury a son, husband, or father only after enough of his remains had been recovered for the family to have something to lay in the ground under his name. Other Topics of Interest Russian Drone Strike Injures 15, Including 2 Children, in Chernihiv A Russian drone crashed into a residential building in Chernihiv, sparking a fire and injuring 15 people, including two children. In Sarajevo, children grew up choosing their route to school according to which streets were exposed to sniper fire. For those who spent years searching for the bones of their sons, husbands, and fathers, the news of Mladić’s death brings no closure. What was lost in Srebrenica cannot be restored by a verdict, a prison sentence or his death. There is therefore little sense in turning this news into a celebration of an old man’s death. What matters far more is that, before he died, he lived to sit before a court, hear survivors testify, see the evidence laid out, and listen to a judgment that stripped away his rank and left one thing in its place: the responsibility of an individual before the law. For the societies of the former Yugoslavia, that matters far more than his final day. A wartime commander who once held other people’s lives in his hands did not die as an untouchable victor with his crimes unresolved; he died as a man whose conduct had been tested in court and whose guilt had been established by a final judgment. For decades in Serbia, it has been difficult to acknowledge Mladić’s guilt without that acknowledgement also being treated as an admission of guilt by the Serbian people as a whole. This idea is both false and deeply damaging, because it puts an entire nation in the position of having to defend a man convicted of genocide in order to prove its own dignity. Ratko Mladić was not Serbia, and his orders, his decisions and his criminal responsibility could not become the guilt of millions simply because they belonged to the same nation. Guilt has a name and belongs to the person who earned it; a nation is neither obliged to inherit it nor entitled to hide it. Acknowledging that Mladić was a war criminal does not make Serbia weaker, guilty or less worthy of respect; it frees Serbia from the degrading obligation to tie its honor to a man whose deeds no decent nation should ever be asked to treat as part of its own honor. The moral test has never been whether we can recognize a crime when an enemy commits it; that is the easiest judgment in any war and in any history. The harder test begins when we apply the same standard to someone who speaks our language, wears a uniform we consider ours, and claims that he is killing or expelling others in order to protect us. Nationalism becomes most dangerous when it hides the individual behind the nation and turns his responsibility into a test of collective loyalty. At that point, citizens are no longer asked to judge what a man has done, but to declare where they belong. If the perpetrator is “ours,” the expected response is to defend, explain, or search for someone else’s crime so ours can be diminished, blurred, or made sufficiently ambiguous that we no longer have to say plainly what happened. Srebrenica is not diminished by the existence of Serbian victims, just as acknowledging Srebrenica takes nothing away from the grief of Serbian families who lost their own. Weighing one set of graves against another has never brought anyone closer to the truth; it merely turns the dead into instruments for the purposes of the living. A man who has lost his son does not suffer more or less because of his nationality, and a mother standing at a grave finds no consolation in being told that somewhere else more or fewer people of another faith were killed. When politicians turn graves into arguments, the dead cease to be remembered as people and become instruments through which the living carry on their old conflicts. Perhaps the ugliest way in which the Yugoslav wars have endured is that people born long after them have been taught not only what happened to those who came before them, but whom they are expected to hate because of it. Young people who have never heard a shell explode, slept in a shelter, or seen a column of refugees have been handed ready-made enemies from years when they did not yet exist, allowing a war to continue without front lines, mobilization or weapons. It was enough for each generation to pass on to the next the belief that someone else’s suffering need not be fully acknowledged, that a crime should be softened because it was committed by one of “ours,” and that an enmity is a child’s inheritance despite having nothing whatsoever to do with the war from which it came. The dead can no longer love or hate, and every hatred we justify today in their name belongs to us. Fewer and fewer of those who made the crucial political and military decisions of the 1990s are still alive. Presidents, generals, party leaders, and commanders who once decided the fate of cities, borders, and human beings are passing into history, and soon almost the entire generation that lived through that war directly and, in many cases, made the decisions that shaped its course will be gone. If a child born 20 years after Srebrenica one day hates someone simply because he is a Bosniak, Serb, or Croat, that hatred will have nothing to do with the front lines of the 1990s. Someone will have had to teach that child whom to hate, explain why, and persuade him that people he has never met are his enemies. That is where history ceases to be an explanation and responsibility becomes ours. What Ukraine is living through The question reaches far beyond the Balkans. Ukraine knows now how quickly ordinary life can be destroyed when a city becomes a military target, how unbearable it is to wait for news of a missing loved one, and how war can remain inside a family long after the front has moved hundreds of kilometers away. People in Bucha, Mariupol, Kharkiv, and elsewhere need little imagination when they read about Srebrenica or Sarajevo. For them, Mladić’s case shows how long the road from atrocity to final judgment can be, and how many years may pass before a man who once commanded an army, enjoyed political protection and believed himself untouchable finally sits before judges for whom his rank and former power count for nothing. Decades of waiting are a cruel measure of justice, but a final judgment still denies the perpetrator one last privilege he might otherwise have retained: the power to dictate how history remembers him. Courts, however, can do only the work they were created to do. They can establish facts, weigh evidence, convict individuals and leave behind a record far harder to alter than a political speech or a family story. They cannot make people recognize the humanity of victims who are not their own; they cannot prevent a parent from passing hatred to a child; and they cannot stop a society from turning a convicted war criminal into a hero if it needs that hero to avoid looking honestly at itself. The judgment against Ratko Mladić settled the question of his criminal responsibility, but no court can settle the question of our relationship with him. There is no tribunal left behind which we can hide; whether we hand the next generation facts or enemies is entirely our choice. I would like Mladić’s death to be one of the last times the wars of the 1990s dictate how people who have long since entered another century feel about one another. That asks neither that we forget nor that we pretend responsibility was equal. It requires something much more exacting: a memory that knows the name of the victim, the name of the perpetrator, and the difference between them, without inserting an entire nation between the two. The generation now growing up in Belgrade, Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Zagreb, Pristina and elsewhere across the former Yugoslavia has the right to know what happened, including what is painful for the community it belongs to. It has no reason to receive, along with that truth, a list of people it is expected to hate. The deaths of war criminals will not, by themselves, close the era they leave behind, but each one leaves us with fewer excuses to keep that era alive. Ratko Mladić can no longer order an attack, decide another person’s fate, or name a new enemy, yet the world he belonged to can survive through people willing to inherit its divisions and pass them on to those with no personal memory of the war. That is where we will eventually discover whether we truly left the 1990s behind, or merely waited for the men at the center of those wars to die while preserving their conflicts for the generations that come after us. A war does not end when the people who fought it die, but when the generations born afterward refuse to inherit the enemies of their parents and grandparents. As long as hatred is passed down through families as an inheritance, the war is not over; it has only changed form. The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.