Ratko Mladic dies in The Hague at 84 while serving a life term for genocide

Ratko Mladic died on 27 August in the hospital ward of the United Nations Detention Unit in The Hague. He was 84 and was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals confirmed the death and said Judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered a full inquiry. Dutch authorities opened their own investigation.

His lawyer, Dragan Ivetic, said Mladic had spent his last months in the hospital wing. The family told the Associated Press that his son Darko was travelling to The Hague. Court papers listed his birth date as 12 March 1942. His son has said the true date was 8 March 1943.

In May the court rejected a bid for release. The judge accepted that Mladic's condition was dire and said he was receiving treatment in prison. Lawyers filed another humanitarian request in the days before he died, quoting detention doctors who warned that death could come at any time.

The verdict he died under

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia convicted Mladic on 22 November 2017. The trial ran for more than four years, 530 sitting days, 592 witnesses and nearly 10,000 exhibits. Appeals upheld the life term in 2021.

He was found guilty of genocide for the July 1995 killings of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys after Bosnian Serb forces took Srebrenica, a United Nations-declared safe area. He was also convicted for the siege of Sarajevo, where the chamber counted a campaign of sniping and shelling against civilians, and for hostage-taking of UN personnel. He was acquitted of a separate genocide count covering several municipalities in 1992.

The chamber held that Mladic took part in four joint criminal enterprises: an overarching plan to remove non-Serbs from large parts of Bosnia, the Sarajevo campaign, the Srebrenica operation and the hostage-taking. It placed him with Radovan Karadzic and Slobodan Milosevic in that structure. Karadzic was convicted of genocide in 2016 and remains in custody.

At a 2014 hearing Mladic said he did not recognise the court. When the 2017 sentence was read he shouted that the findings were lies. Those lines are the public record of his defence. They did not move the chamber.

Command and the years on the run

Mladic took command of the Army of Republika Srpska in 1992. The ICTY treated him as the officer with command responsibility for both Srebrenica and Sarajevo. Emir Suljagic, who runs the Srebrenica Memorial Center, wrote after the death that it does not bring back the dead, erase the mass graves or alter the verdicts.

He was indicted in July 1995. He lived in Belgrade under Milosevic's protection, then went into hiding after Milosevic's arrest in 2001. Serbian police arrested him on 26 May 2011 at a cousin's house in Lazarevo and sent him to The Hague. The capture was treated in Brussels as one of the conditions for Serbia's EU candidate status.

The Bosnian war killed more than 100,000 people and displaced more than two million. Mladic was the most senior military figure the tribunal took alive. His death closes the case file. It does not close the graves still being identified from the columns that left Srebrenica in July 1995.

What the inquiry can do

The Mechanism's inquiry is a custody procedure. It will record time, place and medical facts. It will not reopen the judgement. Relatives of the Srebrenica dead have said for years that they wanted him to serve the sentence, not to be sent home. The May ruling already answered that request.

Serbian state media reported the death first. Reactions in Banja Luka and Belgrade will split along the same lines they have split since 1995. The legal fact is simpler. The man convicted of genocide at Srebrenica died in the same UN facility that held him for fifteen years, under a sentence that outlasted him.