Serbia buries Ratko Mladic at Topcider with military honours

Ratko Mladic's coffin sat in the Church of St Luke on Vidikovac on Monday morning with his officer's cap, sabre and decorations on the lid. Men in fatigues stood watch. Thousands queued outside. The burial was set for about 2 p.m. at Topcider cemetery, in a family plot beside his daughter Ana, with full military honours. Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Church was to conduct the service.

Mladic died on 27 August in the detention hospital at The Hague, aged 84, while serving a life sentence imposed in 2017 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The convictions covered the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo. The UN Residual Mechanism confirmed the death. Judge Graciela Gatti Santana ordered an inquiry into the medical circumstances.

The family arranged the funeral on paper. The Serbian state supplied the rest. A government aircraft brought the body from the Netherlands last week. Soldiers carried the flag-draped coffin off the plane. A commemoration was held on Saturday at the Army House. About 300 people attended that event, including Serbia's justice minister and Republika Srpska President Sinisa Karan. Justice Minister Nenad Vujic had already said Mladic would receive the highest state honours.

Among the first to pass the coffin on Monday was Radan Ostojic, labour and veterans' minister of Republika Srpska. He told RTRS that Mladic had "reunited the people." A mourner who had travelled from Kosovo, Milan Dobric, called Mladic a man who gave everything for the Serbian people. Veterans of the wartime Bosnian Serb army took turns beside the coffin.

The European Union had already registered its objection. On 4 September, Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos cancelled a planned visit to Serbia after the government plane and the military escort. Brussels has told Belgrade for years that public homage to Hague convicts sits badly with a membership bid. Serbia proceeded anyway.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, glorification of war criminals is a criminal offence. Local reporting in the week after Mladic's death put the number of complaints at about 76,000 and the number of opened cases above 930. Those figures measure a legal system trying to police speech across an entity structure that still treats Mladic as a hero in one half of the country and as the butcher of Srebrenica in the other.

Saturday's Army House event was described at the time as a commemoration without state honours. Monday's protocol reversed that. Arrival at Topcider was listed for 1.30 p.m., with the highest military honours. The distance between those two descriptions is the distance Aleksandar Vucic's government is willing to travel against EU advice in an election-season Balkans.

Mladic commanded the Army of Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years as a fugitive. The Hague trial lasted years. The appeal confirmed the life term. The body that left the Scheveningen hospital last week has now been absorbed into a state ritual in Belgrade. The legal record did not change. The audience for the funeral is not the court.