The Balkans continue to demonstrate, with every passing crisis, that their geography carries a memory that never sleeps. At the beginning of September 2026, the funeral of Ratko Mladic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by international justice for genocide and crimes against humanity, reopened a wound that had been thought to have healed. The condemnation expressed by the international community, particularly by Türkiye, after Mladic’s funeral as a hero was not a fleeting reaction to these events. It reflected a deeper concern: the glorification of war criminals is not merely an affront to memory; it also shows that tensions have never truly been resolved, but merely frozen.

Tito’s Yugoslavia was built around the slogan of "brotherhood and unity,” an officially imposed political principle intended to merge six republics and several nationalities into a single identity. This slogan could in no way substitute for a genuine experience of reconciliation. Rather, it constituted an administrative measure that forcibly froze historical wounds and created the illusion of an apparent peace, which eventually turned into a time bomb, culminating in the abrupt economic collapse of the 1980s. It was then that the failure of the state became apparent, and the ruling elites attempted to conceal it behind radical nationalist rhetoric under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic.

The invocation of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo as though it had taken place the day before revived an old logic of victimhood, projected onto contemporary Bosnian Muslims through the figure of the invading Turk, from whom revenge had to be exacted. This was a form of political engineering that exploited collective memory in order to evade the failure to manage the state, the collapse of its economy, and its inability to fulfill its promises to guarantee its citizens a dignified life.

Manufacture of barbarism

This phenomenon can be explained through two mechanisms. The first is transgenerational trauma: the group adopts a mentality of perpetual victimhood that grants it an absolute moral right to preventive violence. The second is the dilution of responsibility: individual guilt dissolves into notions of national duty and obedience to superior orders. In this climate charged with tension, the neighbor becomes a spy and the child a biological threat that must be eradicated.

We would hope that today’s generations would distance themselves from those who took up arms and committed crimes, wherever they occurred, in the Balkans as well as in Syria, for example. The Serbian state should have worked to raise a generation reconciled with its history, aware that this man belongs both to its history and to its country, but that he remains a war criminal who does not deserve to be glorified. Condemning crimes does not mean condemning an entire people, just as belonging to a people cannot justify absolving or glorifying its criminals. It is the responsibility of the state to help build a memory that acknowledges the crime without passing its guilt on to generations that did not commit it.

Strategy of systematic erasure

The operations carried out by the Army of Republika Srpska under Mladic’s command were not merely military operations, but a project based on a dual process of erasure: cultural erasure, through the burning of libraries and the destruction of mosques and bridges, and the biological erasure of the population, through the execution of men and boys in order to prevent the continuation of future generations. In Sarajevo as in Srebrenica, this amounted to demographic engineering in its most extreme form: altering the composition of a territory at the cost of the blood of its inhabitants.

Bosnian Croats were not strangers to this logic. Between 1993 and 1994, after an initial alliance with the Muslims, they became their adversaries. By shelling Mostar’s Old Bridge, they were not targeting a military objective, but a cultural symbol that the attackers sought to erase, along with every trace of the Ottomans from the memory of the city.

Amid this collapse, Alija Izetbegovic emerged as a rare intellectual and political leader. He upheld the principle of fighting without abandoning his civilizational identity. He did not allow places of worship to be destroyed or Serbian and Croatian civilians to be targeted in retaliation for the massacres committed against his Muslim people. When he was forced to sign the Dayton Accords in 1995 in order to save his people from total extermination, he accepted a bitter peace as a rational choice, bringing the bloodshed to an end and carrying the struggle for justice onto its own terrain.

Bosnia-Herzegovina cannot be analyzed independently of its regional dynamics. Türkiye’s role must be understood within this context according to its own logic, not as an expression of emotion, but as a structured policy resting on three factors. The first is historical: centuries of Ottoman Muslim presence have left an architectural, religious, and cultural legacy in the Balkans. The second is demographic: Bosniaks maintain ties with contemporary Turkish-Islamic identity. The third is strategic: Bosnia constitutes a gateway to a regional balance in the Western Balkans.

At the same time, new balances of power are taking shape, making the Republic of Serbia a foothold for external influence that intersects with separatist projects. This polarization does not serve stability. On the contrary, it turns the Balkans into an arena of competition and keeps the wound open.

Conditional reconciliation

Mladic’s funeral showed that the political freezing of a conflict does not mean that it has healed within society. The European Union threatened to suspend Serbia’s accession negotiations, reaffirming a clear principle: glorifying war criminals and denying massacres constitutes a direct rejection of the values of peace.

Preserving the memory of the crime and its victims is essential to preventing its repetition, particularly by criminalizing genocide denial and creating places of memory that shield historical truth from political interests and manipulation. This memory must enlighten generations that did not experience the war, rather than passing collective guilt on to them.

From the perspective of Izetbegovic, genocide is not merely a political crime, but an existential sin committed against the dignity with which God has honored the human being. In his work "Escape to Freedom," Izetbegovic categorically rejects any neutrality in the face of injustice. From this perspective, glorifying a war criminal is not simply a political opinion, but a siding with evil and a betrayal of moral clarity. It is a double sin: a sin against the victims, by denying their dignity and disregarding the blood they shed, and a sin against the new generations, by sowing the seeds of vengeance in the consciousness of those born after the war.