Bosnia expels two Serbian diplomats after Mladić's Belgrade funeral

Bosnia and Herzegovina expelled two officials from Serbia's embassy in Sarajevo on 8 September and cancelled plans to sign a regional cooperation paper with Belgrade. Foreign Minister Elmedin Konaković tied both steps to the public funeral held in Serbia a day earlier for Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide.

The men named were military attaché Milan Dulanović and Darko Maksimović, listed as an adviser to the representative of Serbia's Security Intelligence Agency at the embassy. Konaković said their diplomatic identity cards would be cancelled and that they had 48 hours from 2 p.m. local time to leave. He invoked rules on undesirable persons adopted by Bosnia's three-member Presidency in 2004.

Mladić died on 27 August in the United Nations detention hospital at The Hague, where he was serving a life term handed down in 2017. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals convicted him of genocide for the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica, where at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered, and of crimes against humanity for the siege of Sarajevo. Thousands attended the funeral in Belgrade on 7 September. Serbian army soldiers carried the coffin outside the Church of St. Luke. The head of the Serbian Orthodox Church officiated.

Serbia's justice minister had first spoken of military and state honours. After protests from European Union officials, President Aleksandar Vučić said the ceremony was a family event and that he would not attend. Defence and justice ministers still went, as did Republika Srpska President Siniša Karan and Russia's ambassador to Serbia, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko. Vučić rejected the charge that the state had glorified a convicted war criminal.

Konaković told a press conference that Serbia had "crossed all red lines" in the days around the funeral. He said Bosnia would not sign a memorandum on good-neighbourly relations and Western Balkan cooperation due in Montenegro on 1 October. "With such a Serbia we will not sign documents on good neighbourly relations," he said. Sarajevo had already begun thinning its embassy staff in Belgrade.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa issued matching statements on 8 September. They called images from the commemoration "shocking" and said they raised questions about Serbia's bid to join the European Union. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said accession requires a clear stand on European values and on the historical record of the 1990s wars. The bloc's annual reports on candidate countries are due in the coming weeks.

The funeral exposed a split that Dayton never closed. In Republika Srpska, Mladić is still treated by many officials as a defender of Serbs. In the Federation, he is the commander who directed the longest siege of a European capital since the Second World War. Bosnia's foreign ministry is run from the Federation side of that arrangement. Banja Luka's leadership sent mourners to Belgrade. That gap now sits on paper as an expulsion order and a withdrawn signature.

Serbia has not announced a matching expulsion. Reciprocal moves are common in the Balkans when one capital names diplomats persona non grata. The practical effect in Sarajevo is a thinner Serbian military and intelligence presence at a moment when Bosnia's own institutions already struggle to agree on a single foreign policy.

The October memorandum in Montenegro was meant as a low-cost signal that Western Balkan governments could still put words on paper together. Bosnia's withdrawal leaves a hole in that text and a public record that a genocide conviction did not stop a state funeral with soldiers at the church door. How Belgrade answers, and whether Brussels treats the funeral as a line in Serbia's accession file, will show whether 8 September was a one-day protest or a longer freeze.