Bosnia expels two Serbian embassy officials after they attend Ratko Mladić's funeral

Bosnia and Herzegovina declared two officials from Serbia's embassy in Sarajevo persona non grata on 8 September after they attended the funeral of Ratko Mladić in Belgrade. The men are Milan Dulanović, the military attaché, and Darko Maksimović, listed as an adviser for Serbia's Security Intelligence Agency. The foreign ministry said standing at the grave of a commander convicted of genocide was incompatible with their posts.

Mladić led the Bosnian Serb army through the 1992-95 war. The Hague tribunal convicted him of genocide for the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered after the enclave fell. He was also convicted of persecution, extermination and other crimes in campaigns across eastern Bosnia. He died after years of illness in detention. Serbia staged a public funeral. Crowds filled the route. European officials had warned that official honours would treat the verdict as optional.

A military attaché is an accredited officer whose job is liaison, not commemoration. An intelligence adviser under diplomatic title is a service officer with immunity. Both men chose to be seen at the burial. Sarajevo's reply was expulsion, not indictment. Persona non grata means they lose accreditation and must leave. It does not put them in a Bosnian court. The tool exists because ambassadors cannot arrest other ambassadors. They can send them home.

Dayton Bosnia makes the gesture sharper. The state-level foreign ministry speaks for a country whose other half, Republika Srpska, still prints posters that call Mladić a defender. Banja Luka politicians will read the expulsion as an insult to Serb memory. Sarajevo will read the funeral as an insult to the graves at Potočari. Both readings were already in the air. The names on the note make them official.

Belgrade's first hours produced no announced matching expulsion. Reciprocity is the usual Balkan sequel: two Bosnian diplomats get a similar letter and the ledger looks even. If that happens, the story becomes a swap. If it does not, Serbia absorbs the hit and keeps the funeral pictures. Either path leaves Dulanović and Maksimović as the officers who decided a war-crimes burial was part of the job.

The regional file is already crowded. Serbia's prime minister has moved toward snap elections. Bosnia is still arguing over electoral law and secession talk from Banja Luka. A double expulsion will not settle those fights. It does set a marker that the state in Sarajevo will not treat Mladić's coffin as a neutral ceremony. For families who still search for remains from 1995, that marker is the part of the day that is not theatre.

Diplomatic lists change quietly after the cameras leave. The two men will be replaced by two others. The funeral video will stay online. The question that remains is whether Belgrade treats the expulsion as a cost of the burial, or as the start of a longer freeze with the ministry that signed the note.