BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb commander who died while serving a life sentence for war crimes, was buried on Monday with military honors and crowds attending as Serbia defied European Union warnings against allowing public homage to the man found guilty of the continent’s first case of genocide since World War II.
Thousands of mourners started arriving early at the small Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Luke in Belgrade to honor
Mladic as his body lay in state. Mladic is still viewed as a hero by many Serbs. His military officer's cap and saber rested on the coffin, which was flanked by men in fatigues.
The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porfirije, led the funeral service while Serbian army soldiers carried Mladic's flag-draped coffin at the cemetery as mourners clapped and a military orchestra played. Pro-government media broadcast the ceremony live.
Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Milorad Dodik and the Russian ambassador in Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, were among those present at the funeral.
Mladic died at 84 on Aug. 27 in The Hague, Netherlands, where he was serving a life sentence. He was sentenced in 2017 for orchestrating the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995; the yearslong siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo; and other war crimes, including setting up concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers.
Since Mladic died, his nationalist admirers have held vigils, painted a series of murals in Belgrade with his image and lit flares in his honor. On Sunday evening, soccer fans displayed a huge image of Mladic and chanted his name at a match in Belgrade.
In Bosnia, the Mothers of Srebrenica group that gathers relatives of the victims urged the EU to react, saying that Mladic's funeral “threatens to become the biggest fascist gathering in Europe in the last 70 years.”
“The glorification of genocide is not honor, it's a shame,” they said on X.
A U.N. “safe haven” for Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Srebrenica ended up being overrun by Serbs who forced men and boys to strip, killed them and bulldozed their bodies into mass graves.
The EU's foreign service said in a statement that “any glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and revisionism contradict the most fundamental European values and have no place in the EU or in EU candidate countries.”
“We are standing in solidarity with all victims, survivors and their families who suffered from war crimes in countries of former Yugoslavia,” the statement said.
For Milan Dobric, a mourner who traveled from Kosovo for the funeral, Mladic “was a man who gave everything in his life for the Serbian people.” Dobric is “glad that this morning people are coming to pay special respect.”
While the funeral arrangements were formally made by Mladic's family, the Serbian government also sent a plane last week to bring his remains to Belgrade, and soldiers carried his coffin wrapped in the national flag. A military commemoration was held Saturday at an official Serbian army venue.
Populist President Aleksandar Vucic, a former extreme nationalist who supported Serbia’s expansionist policies during the war, described the funeral as an “emotional outpouring” that “has nothing to do” with whether the Serbian government approved it or not.
Serbia is a candidate nation for European Union membership and has faced strong criticism for honoring Mladic after his death.
Marta Kos, the enlargement commissioner for the bloc, canceled an upcoming visit to Serbia in protest, arguing that “the glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.”
Serbia, which backed Bosnian Serb forces during the war, remains defiant over its wartime role and accuses the West of anti-Serb bias.
Vucic said that “we (Serbs) have been persecuted and harassed for 30, 40 years ... always guilty whatever happens,” He added that “people just won’t take it anymore.”
Vucic, who is not attending the funeral, previously has accused Kos of lying. The Serbian president has stepped up his anti-Western rhetoric ahead of an early parliamentary election expected next month.
A number of other European officials joined the criticism of Serbia, along with regional leaders and relatives of Mladic's victims from the war in Bosnia. The conflict left more than 100,000 people dead and over 1 million homeless before it ended in 1995 in a U.S.-brokered peace agreement.
