Convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, whose forces besieged the Bosnian capital for several years in the 1990s and carried out the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, "will receive all the military and state honors to which he is entitled," Serbia said Friday.
Mladic died Thursday while serving a life sentence in The Hague for war crimes committed during the 1990s Bosnian war. He was 84.
"It is certain that General Mladic will receive all the military and state honours to which he is entitled, as far as the state is concerned," Serbia's Justice Minister Nenad Vujic said.
Serbian officials were awaiting details on when authorities in The Hague would release the body, he told the K1 broadcaster.
"We are ready to leave for The Hague as soon as we learn what the next steps are," the minister said.
Mladic, who had suffered several strokes in recent months, was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian War, including for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe's worst act of bloodshed since World War II.
His conviction in 2017 for the wartime killings was considered a key step toward bringing justice to the victims and led the international press to dub him the "Butcher of Bosnia."
He had been in custody since 2011 after many years on the run.
The ruthless, former communist officer-turned nationalist warlord was one of the most notorious figures of the Bosnian War that left more than 100,000 people dead and over 1 million homeless. He commanded his troops to "scorch the brains" of the Bosnian Muslims and boasted of being a "Serbian God."
The Hague tribunal said at the time the crimes committed were "amongst the most heinous known to humankind." Former U.N. rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein described him as "the epitome of evil."
Mladic was the military face of a brutal trio, led on the political side by ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. Milosevic also died in the custody of the Hague court in 2006 while on trial for genocide.
When the ethnic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina started in 1992, Mladic became the commander of the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swaths of the country to form a Serb mini-state.
Serbs under Mladic's control laid siege to the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and other cities and villages, established concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, and systematically killed prisoners. In Sarajevo, Serb troops kept the city isolated while killing civilians with snipers and heavy artillery.
In 1995, Mladic's troops slaughtered more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica – the first case of genocide in Europe since WWII.
To this day, many Serbs still see him as a hero. Local authorities in Bosnia's Serb entity, Republika Srpska, called on residents to pay their respects to Mladic in churches across the entity.
