Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a U.N.-designated “safe area” of Bosnia, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War II, has died, a U.N. official said on Thursday.
Mladić, who was serving a life sentence on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, died in a U.N. prison hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, a spokesperson confirmed.
A U.N. statement said that Dutch authorities “have commenced the standard procedures and investigations required under Dutch national law,” while Judge Graciela Gatti Santana of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals has “ordered a full inquiry.”
The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000.
The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.
The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was “ethnic cleansing” — the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.
The tribunal found that Mladić, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milošević and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadžić, was part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
“I do not recognize this court,” Mladić, dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia” by his opponents, said at an ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 he shouted: “This is all lies, you are all liars!”
According to his son, documents gave Mladić’s date of birth as March 12, 1942, but he was actually born March 8, 1943.
Genocide conviction
Karadžić, also convicted of genocide in 2016, and Mladić topped the ICTY wanted list for years after Western powers ended the war. But until Milošević was toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladić lived securely — if discreetly — in Belgrade.
Milošević died in detention on March 11, 2006, a few months before a verdict in his four-year tribunal trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The army Mladić created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness, daring and brutality in the Serb warrior tradition, once prized in the life-or-death partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II.
In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water, were starved and raped in prison camps, were made to jump off a bridge and shot, and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas.
“For me Mladić is a symbol of all horrible crimes that happened during the war — our girls were raped and boys killed, only because they were Muslim,” said Munira Subašić, whose son and husband were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran Srebrenica.
“Germans had Hitler, Serbs have Mladić,” Subašić continued. “There is no difference between the two.”
Mladić had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, to show him extolling his “lads” and haranguing Dutch U.N. peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. Srebrenica supposedly had “safe area” status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.
“We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,” Mladić said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who once held the area as part of the Ottoman Empire.
The next day, Mladić’s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for execution.
When NATO tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops defiantly seized U.N. peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets.
In November 1996 Mladić and top generals gave in to strong Western pressure that he step down as ordered by Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavšić, who succeeded Karadžić and was later jailed for her role in war crimes.
Son of partisan fighter
The son of a World War II partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladić was an officer in the old communist Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia’s disintegration began in 1991.
When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia’s Muslim-led secession, Mladić was picked to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the landlocked country.
Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA and villages were burned down as 22,000 troops of the U.N. Protection Force stood by more or less helplessly, with orders not to take sides.
A combination of Western pressure, covert American arms and training for Croats and Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladić’s army. Determined NATO strikes did the rest.
Sick and frail
Despite Western appeals, the reformists ruling Serbia after Milošević’s fall did not dare move against a man who was a hero to a core of nationalist Serbs.
Sporadic sightings put him at a Belgrade horse race or a soccer match. In 2004, NATO said he had toasted hard-drinking old comrades at his former bunker in Han Pijesak, Bosnia.
When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance. His right arm was lame, the apparent result of an untreated stroke. He looked nothing like the burly general in camouflage who ruffled the hair of a Srebrenica boy in 1995.
He suffered a heart attack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. By his own account, he felt like a frail old man.
In his few court appearances, he wavered between self-pity, smiling defiance and vague distraction.
“I am a very sick man,” Mladić pleaded to the court.
In 2019, Mladić told the judges that he was too ill to participate in outdoor exercises and requested leave to visit the graves of family members in Serbia. The request was denied.
His appeal against conviction was rejected in 2021, as were repeated requests for his release on compassionate grounds.
In August 2026, a U.N. doctor found Mladić’s death “may occur at any time,” possibly within weeks, but his application for release was again rejected as not in the interests of justice.
