Bosnia expels Serbian diplomats after Belgrade buries Ratko Mladić with military honours

Bosnia's foreign minister, Elmedin Konaković, expelled two Serbian diplomats on Tuesday and accused Belgrade of crossing every red line after the funeral of Ratko Mladić. He had already said he would pull most of Sarajevo's embassy staff out of Serbia, leaving the ambassador and the consul. The two people ordered to leave were described as Serbia's defence envoy and an adviser from the intelligence service.

Mladić was buried in Belgrade on Monday, 8 September. He died on 27 August, aged 84, in the United Nations detention unit at The Hague, where he was serving a life sentence. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted him of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, including command responsibility for the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica, where about 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered after Bosnian Serb forces took the enclave, and for the siege of Sarajevo.

The funeral was one of the largest public burials in Serbia since the end of communist rule in 1990. Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Church led the service. Army soldiers carried a coffin wrapped in the Serbian flag. Defence Minister Bratislav Gašić and Justice Minister Nenad Vujić were among at least six ministers present. Milorad Dodik, the Bosnian Serb nationalist leader, attended. So did the Russian ambassador, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko. Mourners wore shirts printed with Mladić's face. His wife, son and grandchildren received condolences inside the church while veterans stood at the coffin.

A state plane, then a family service

The body came home last week on a government aircraft. Six soldiers carried it off the plane under flags. A minister had first spoken of a state funeral. That plan was dropped after European governments objected. President Aleksandar Vučić did not go to the church. His son Danilo did. Vučić called the day an emotional outpouring, said the family had organised the service, and rejected the charge that Serbia was glorifying a convicted man. The family publicly thanked him for his support. He had already backed what he called a dignified funeral.

In the Bosniak-Croat federation, telecom operators blocked the signal of two Bosnian Serb stations that carried the procession live. The contrast wrote itself: a flag, a patriarch and a guard of soldiers in Belgrade, a jammed broadcast in Sarajevo.

Ursula von der Leyen and European Council president António Costa called the presence of Serbian officials deeply regrettable. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas wrote that Serbia's path into the Union requires an unequivocal commitment to European values and historical truth. Membership talks were already slow. A hero's burial for the man Hague judges named a genocidaire gives opponents of those talks a fresh file.

What the honours were for

Among Serb nationalists, in Serbia and in Republika Srpska, Mladić is still cast as a defender. That is why the funeral filled a church and a cemetery. Among Bosniaks, and in the tribunal's judgment, he is the commander of Europe's worst massacre since 1945. Those two sentences cannot be reconciled in a joint statement. They can only be managed or ignored. Belgrade chose honours and then called them private. Sarajevo chose expulsions and a hollowed-out embassy.

Vučić wants open doors in Brussels and in Moscow. The funeral made that split visible. He stayed away from the church and let ministers, soldiers, a patriarch and a Russian ambassador fill the frame. Konaković answered with the only tools a small foreign ministry has: two expulsions and a thinner embassy. The next listing in Brussels will decide whether those tools were enough to move a chapter, or only enough to put a photograph on the record.