Ratko Mladić dies at 84 in the UN prison hospital at The Hague
A UN official confirmed the death on Thursday after Serbian television reported it. The Bosnian Serb commander was serving a life term for the Srebrenica genocide and the siege of Sarajevo. A UN doctor had said in August that death might come within weeks. Release was refused.
The Hague2 min read
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Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb army commander convicted of genocide for the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica, died on Thursday in the United Nations detention hospital in The Hague. He was 84. Serbian state television RTS and Republika Srpska television reported the death first. A UN official later confirmed it to Reuters. Family members said his son Darko was travelling to the Netherlands.
Mladić had been in UN custody since his arrest in Lazarevo, Vojvodina, on 26 May 2011, after 16 years as a fugitive. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced him to life in November 2017. The Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals upheld the conviction and the sentence on 8 June 2021. Repeated requests for compassionate release were refused, including an application this month after a UN doctor wrote that death might occur at any time, possibly within weeks.
Serbian justice officials had asked again this week for a transfer to Serbia for treatment. The court said release was not in the interests of justice. RTS said he had suffered several strokes.
What the 2017 judgment found
Judges held Mladić responsible for the murder of at least 8,000 Bosniak men and boys after the fall of the UN-declared safe area of Srebrenica in July 1995. They also convicted him for the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo, in which about 10,000 civilians died under artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns. The trial chamber found a joint criminal enterprise with Radovan Karadžić and, in overlapping form, with Slobodan Milošević, to remove non-Serbs from large parts of Bosnia.
The 1992-95 war killed about 100,000 people and displaced 2.2 million. Mladić took command of the Army of Republika Srpska in May 1992. He was indicted in 1995. He left his post in 1996 under Western pressure and spent the next decade and a half hidden by networks in Serbia.
At a 2014 hearing he told the court he did not recognise it. When the life sentence was read in 2017 he shouted that the judges were liars. The appeals bench rejected those arguments in 2021 by four votes to one.
Why the date is not a closing of the file
Srebrenica commemoration still splits Bosnian politics every July. Republika Srpska officials have long treated Mladić as a defender rather than a convict. His death in a Dutch hospital, after the court refused a last transfer, will feed that argument in Banja Luka and Belgrade. It will not change the judgment.
The Mechanism still holds other residual work from the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals. Karadžić remains in custody. Milošević died in 2006 before a verdict. Mladić’s case was the last of the three central Bosnia files to reach a final sentence. The graves at Potočari and the siege record in Sarajevo are the parts of the story that do not move with his death.
UN court officials had declined to confirm the death in the first hours after the Serbian broadcasts. The later confirmation from a UN official is the point at which the record can be written as fact.
