Thousands file past Ratko Mladic's coffin in Belgrade

Thousands of people queued on 7 September at the Church of St Luke in Belgrade's Vidikovac district to file past the coffin of Ratko Mladic. The former Bosnian Serb commander died on 27 August in The Hague, aged 84, while serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Serbian media cited police figures of at least 8,000 people outside the church by midday.

The coffin lay in the church from early morning. Mladic's officer cap and sabre rested on the lid. Veterans of the wartime Bosnian Serb army took turns as an honour guard. His wife, son and grandchildren received condolences inside. Free buses ran from towns in Serbia and from Republika Srpska. Four buses of demobilised soldiers left Banja Luka before dawn.

Patriarch Porfirije of the Serbian Orthodox Church led the funeral service at noon. Burial was scheduled at Topcider cemetery, beside Mladic's daughter Ana, who died in 1994. Justice Minister Nenad Vujic had said the burial would carry the highest state honours. Soldiers had already carried the flag-draped coffin after a government aircraft brought the body from the Netherlands last week.

Who came, and who stayed away

Three Serbian ministers attended, representing the government. President Aleksandar Vucic said he would not be there, citing a scheduled visit by Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. Vucic had dismissed foreign criticism of the homage but did not put himself in the church.

The European Union had warned Serbia against a public celebration of a man convicted of the first genocide judged in Europe since the Second World War. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found Mladic guilty of genocide for the killing of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995, and of crimes tied to the siege of Sarajevo and other campaigns in the 1992-95 war. In Bosnia, rights groups said tens of thousands of complaints had been filed over glorification of a convicted war criminal.

Milan Dobric, who travelled from Kosovo, told reporters Mladic was a man who gave everything for the Serbian people. That sentence is the local register inside the churchyard. The tribunal judgment is the legal register outside it. Both were on display in Belgrade on Monday.

What the state chose to do

The family handled the funeral on paper. The state supplied the aircraft, the soldiers, the road closures and the ministerial presence. That combination is a policy choice. It tells EU accession talks and Bosnian victims the same thing: the conviction in The Hague does not govern memory in Vidikovac.

Streets around the church were closed. Police stood at intersections. Pro-government outlets billed full military honours. The body of a man sentenced to die in prison instead lay under a cap and a sabre in a parish church, with a patriarch at the lectern and buses on the motorway from Banja Luka.

The factual chain is short. Death in custody on 27 August. Transfer to Belgrade. Lying in state on 7 September. Service at noon. Grave at Topcider beside Ana Mladic. The political chain is longer and will outlast the burial: how Serbia writes Srebrenica into its next decade of talks with Brussels, and how Republika Srpska writes it into its own.