Miloš Ćirić, a political scientist in Belgrade, writes in Danas, Sept. 12-13, 2026:
Serbia buried the war criminal Ratko Mladic with a ceremonial unit, an honor guard, a rifle volley and eulogies. Patriarch Porfirije led the funeral service. In attendance were Serbia’s ministers of defense, justice, culture and labor; the son of President Aleksandar Vucic and his friends; Milorad Dodik; the Russian ambassador; and, by some accounts, more than 15,000 people.
Svetozar Andric arranged the honors. The Humanitarian Law Center has filed a criminal complaint against him with Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor, in part over an order of May 31, 1992, that established the Susica camp in Vlasenica. Some 2,500 men, women and children passed through that camp. Female prisoners were taken out at night and raped; about 160 people were killed. The founder of Susica camp was the master of ceremonies at Mr. Mladic’s funeral. There is no investigation against him.
President Vucic was kept from paying his respects by a visit from the president of Uzbekistan; one he had been announcing for October since May. That is his entire method. Vucic let his justice minister float a trial balloon, a funeral “with the highest state and military honors,” then called the announcement “untrue” and promised a “dignified” burial.
Then Serbia sent a government plane for Mladic’s body. The army, under President Vucic’s command, took custody of it; the Army Hall hosted a commemoration for a criminal; the church sang the requiem; the ceremonial unit fired its volley. A state funeral in everything but name, and the name Vucic kept for himself, as an alibi.
Over the coffin, the patriarch called Mladic “a soldier and commander who stood at the head of his people’s army,” then prayed “for all those whose lives were extinguished in that war.” Not one Christian word about repentance, about asking forgiveness: from the victims’ families, from God, from anyone. What was heard was gratitude to a war criminal for everything he had done for Serbia and his people.
In the media: on one side, denial of the genocide and celebration of the criminal; on the other, “moderate” voices weighing their words and measuring how much may be said. The agreement there is an old one. The word genocide is not spoken. Say massacre, or terrible crime, if you must.
At Mladic’s funeral we saw the face of the entire vertical: our political, intellectual and media elite, the church, the army, the police. It is our face, too, because none of this is a run of passions. It is the persistent execution of one and the same policy, the policy that enjoys the broadest support in Serbia.
In May 2026, the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy measured Serbians’ trust in their institutions: 59.7 percent trust the church, 53.9 percent the army, 39.7 percent the president. Nothing new. The figures are almost identical to those of a survey conducted 20 years ago by Strategic Marketing.
These are the very institutions that led the organization of a state funeral for a man convicted of genocide. The trust Serbia’s citizens have placed in them for decades lends legitimacy to their attempts to achieve the aims of the policy for which Serbia destroyed Yugoslavia.
The aim of that policy, whose fulfillment justifies any means, the crime of genocide included, was and remains: all Serbs should live in one state. It was written down before the wars, in the 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, as a grievance that “the Serbian nation, for example, was not given the right to its own state.”
But that state never existed, and such a Serbia does not exist today. What exists is one long and painful continuity of attempts to create it. The people carrying it out have come and gone. The policy has not changed.
The war criminal’s body was met with salutes from police officers and citizens on the highway through Belgrade, where, in 1991, citizens threw flowers at tanks bound for Vukovar, Croatia, and where, in 2001, they carried food and water to the sadists of the Red Berets, the unit that went on to kill Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Flowers for our army’s tanks, food for our state’s killers, a volley for our war criminal. Such consistency is terrifying.
The armed conflicts are over, but with Mladic’s state funeral Serbia is saying it has not finished the job it began with its aggression against the former Yugoslav republics. The record bears this out: for 30 years the Serbian state has destabilized Bosnia and Herzegovina from within, disputed the statehood of Montenegro and denied the independence of Kosovo, all the while concealing the war crimes against civilians that the Serbian army and police committed in Kosovo.
Mladic’s funeral brought all of it back to the surface, and no one in our society could hide from the horror, just as it is impossible to hide the fact that our current representatives in government took part in the war and incited its crimes.
Aleksandar Vucic did not merely inherit a policy of crime and genocide. He was an active participant in carrying it out during the wars, and he supported the crimes of Serbian forces in real time, as they were happening. So, this is not the rehabilitation of Mladic alone. It is the rehabilitation of Vucic too, who will never answer for what he did in the 1990s.
The newest wing of Serbia’s opposition calls for decriminalizing the state: cleansing the institutions of Vucic’s cartel and of the people who turned the state into a private company. They forget that the crime they want to clean out is no disease that attacked healthy tissue. Serbia did not become criminal under Vucic. It was made like that during 1990s, out of the Greater Serbian political program and the wars it waged to fulfill it.
Without the denazification of Serbian society, decriminalization by dismantling one regime will produce the next. Experience has shown as much. A government can be removed. What remains are the criminal institutions: an army that celebrates a war criminal, a church that blesses him, and the 60 percent of citizens who trust that church and that army above all else. All of them say: There was no genocide, and Ratko Mladic is a hero.
The most damning thing for Serbian society is that Aleksandar Vucic can be defeated without a single sentence about genocide, without a word about his personal responsibility for inciting the crimes Serbian forces committed in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. That is precisely why such a victory cannot bring fundamental change.
When the United Nations established a day of remembrance for the Srebrenica genocide in 2024, President Vucic wrapped himself in the Serbian flag in the General Assembly and pushed a slogan: “We are not a genocidal people.” With that, he gave us away.
What else to call a people, if not genocidal, whose majority has for decades placed its greatest trust in the institutions that carried out Serbia’s war crimes and genocidal policy in wartime and celebrated them in peace? What else to call them, when three decades after the genocide they keep giving those same forces their greatest support at the ballot box?
There has always been resistance to this policy in Serbian society, and however modest its reach, it matters. But the overall balance matters more, and it has always tipped toward those who carry the policy of genocide forward. The balance sheet of that policy is known, more than 100,000 killed in Bosnia and Herzegovina; more than 800,000 expelled and thousands killed among Kosovo’s Albanians; tens of thousands maimed, their lives destroyed forever, all in our name and in the name of our state.
That is why Ratko Mladic should be buried in Belgrade. It is the capital of the state he killed for, the state that paid his salary, his pension and his defense, the state that hid him for 10 years. Here he is glorified; here people take pride in him and in his crimes. And it is not only the tens of thousands of Red Star fans chanting his name.
Mladic was buried where he wished, beside the daughter who shot herself with her father’s pistol a year before he commanded the genocide at Srebrenica. He was buried whole, and all at once, which he denied his victims. Them he buried in pits, dug up again with excavators, trucked dead to other pits and buried again in new mass graves, to erase his own trail and the criminal trail of his state.
We will always know where all of Mr. Mladic’s bones are. The bones of his victims, scattered and commingled in a still-unknown number of mass graves in Serbia and in Republika Srpska, will, when they are found, be returned to their families jaw by jaw, bone by bone, piece of skull by piece of skull.
With the state funeral of Ratko Mladic, Serbia has mocked those victims once more, and it is not ashamed. As things stand, neither are most of our citizens. We are that kind of people.
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