Crowds gathered in Belgrade on Monday for the funeral of convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, as the European Union accused some in Serbia of glorifying a man convicted of genocide and other crimes during the 1990s war in Bosnia.
Mladic died in late August at age 84 while serving a life sentence in The Hague after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian war.
Mourners began arriving at St. Luka Church in Belgrade at 7:00 a.m. (5:00 a.m. GMT) to pay their respects. Many kissed Mladic’s closed coffin as Serbian Orthodox priests recited prayers.
Police closed several streets around the church as crowds grew throughout the morning.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) reporters saw large crowds gathered outside the church, many wearing shirts praising Mladic. Aerial footage showed hundreds of mourners lining up to enter the church after the doors opened.
Serbian flags were displayed nearby, while a large banner stretched across the street bearing a message praising Mladic as a hero.
The banner read: “Welcome, General, thanks be to your mother for bearing a hero, so that Serbdom’s glory may return.”
The funeral came as Brussels criticized displays honoring Mladic, who remains a deeply divisive figure across the Balkans more than two decades after the end of the Bosnian war.
“I am here to see off the general, a national hero,” pensioner Radojka Visic, who had traveled from Bosnia’s Serb entity, Republika Srpska, told AFP.
“They couldn’t defeat us on the battlefield, so they sent him to prison and tortured him there instead,” Visic said, referring to the “international community.”
Mladic’s casket arrived in Serbia last week aboard a government plane. It was carried by six soldiers and draped in flags.
As it was driven from the airport in a motorcade, groups of young men held banners praising the former general, and some police officers were seen saluting as it passed.
Last week’s scenes drew condemnation from the European Union’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, who canceled a planned visit to Serbia on Friday, saying the “glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built.”
Denis Becirovic, chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, called it “an act of identification by Serbia’s leadership with one of the worst killers in European history.”
“This has unforeseeable consequences for the future of the entire region,” he wrote on Facebook on Friday.
Mladic’s wartime atrocities during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia earned him the nickname “Butcher of Bosnia” in international media.
The 1992-95 war left around 100,000 people dead and displaced 2.2 million.
Mladic was the military figurehead of the Bosnian Serb leadership alongside former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
The United Nations war crimes court convicted him of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a U.N.-protected safe zone.
The atrocity was Europe’s worst act of bloodshed since World War II.
Fadila Efendic, whose son and husband were killed in Srebrenica, told AFP earlier that it pained her “to know that his ideas are not dead.”
Mladic was also convicted of persecuting and forcibly expelling Bosnian Muslims and Croats, terrorizing civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and taking U.N. peacekeepers hostage during NATO airstrikes in 1995.
Mladic was arrested in 2011, 16 years after he was first indicted, and sentenced to life in prison in 2021 after a nine-year trial.
Despite the verdicts, he is still hailed as a hero by some Serbs, particularly in Republika Srpska, where his death was marked with vigils and gatherings.
Many people from the entity applied to travel to Belgrade for the funeral.
Mladic’s son, Darko, who is officially organizing the funeral, said he was “proud of the role” his father played.
On Saturday, around 300 people gathered at a commemoration for Mladic at a military facility in Belgrade, organized by an association of retired and active Serbian army generals.
Darko and other family members attended, as did Serbian Justice Minister Nenad Vujic and officials from Republika Srpska, including President Sinisa Karan.
Speakers at the ceremony praised Mladic’s wartime role, describing him as a “towering figure both as a man and a soldier.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said tens of thousands of people were expected to attend the funeral and that the state would ensure the event passed “safely.”
He said he would not attend in person because of a prior engagement.
