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Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide for the Srebrenica slaughter and other crimes against humanity
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World news — Julian Borger
After the Bosnian mountain town of Srebrenica fell to Serb troops in July 1995, its terrified Muslim residents were given assurances by the Serb commander of the conquering army, General Ratko Mladić, who has died aged 83.
He told them: “Anyone who wants to leave will be transported, be they old or young. Don’t be afraid and don’t rush. Let the women and children go first.”
In video footage of that day, the general can be seen patting the cheek of an eight-year-old Muslim boy and offering him chocolate. “Please don’t panic. Be careful not to lose any children. Don’t be afraid. Nobody will harm you.”
By then, the Hague war crimes tribunal would later determine, Mladić had ordered the executions of all males of army age or deemed old enough to bear arms. More than 8,000 men and teenage boys were mown down in what would be the worst massacre Europe had witnessed for half a century.
After many years on the run, in 2017 Mladić was convicted of genocide for the slaughter at Srebrenica, alongside convictions for war crimes and crimes against humanity for the many massacres over the preceding three years, as Mladić, his fellow generals, and the Bosnian Serb leadership sought to ethnically cleanse Bosnia of Muslims and Croats.
At the time of his death, in a UN prison hospital in The Hague, Mladić, one of the most reviled mass killers in modern European history, was serving a life sentence. However, among nationalists in Serbia and the Serb half of Bosnia, the Republika Srpska, he is still portrayed as a hero – powerful evidence that the murderous ideology he embodied is still very much alive.
Born in Božanovići, a village in the mountains of the southern Herzegovina region, Ratko was the son of Stana (nee Lalović) and Nedja Mladić. His parents were hiding out with a band of partisans fighting the Nazis and their local allies, the Croatian Ustaše. His given name means “warlike”, and his father was killed in battle before he was two years old.
In socialist postwar Yugoslavia, ruled by the partisan leader Josip Broz Tito , the teenage Mladić served a short apprenticeship as a tinsmith, before finding his true calling in the Yugoslav National Army (JNA). He excelled at the military academy, graduated in 1965 and joined Tito’s communist party like any ambitious officer.
In 1966 he married Bosiljka Jedić, had two children, Darko and Ana, and steadily rose through the JNA ranks to the level of brigade commander by the time federal Yugoslavia fell apart in 1991-92.
The stocky, ruddy-faced soldier embodied all the contradictions of Yugoslavia. He mouthed the party’s mantra of “brotherhood and unity” among the country’s ethnicities, but remained a Serb chauvinist in his bones, with the desire for revenge, not just for the second world war, but for the Ottoman conquest more than five centuries earlier.
After Tito’s death, the old socialist bromides began to lose their power. Slobodan Milošević , a wily smooth-talking ex-banker, took the helm in 1989 and soon realised that communism had run its course as the ideological rationale for the concentration of power. Serb nationalism on the other hand was resurgent, and Milošević deftly switched horses.
Serb officers were put in charge of JNA outposts across Yugoslavia, and Mladić was dispatched to Kosovo with the task of suppressing majority ethnic Albanians, and then to Croatia in the summer of 1991, to fight against secessionist forces in that country’s war of independence. By then he was a colonel, with a growing reputation for ruthlessness in the field and the devastating use of artillery on enemy soldiers and civilians alike.
So when Serb separatist leaders such as Radovan Karadzić in Bosnia were looking for a military commander to help them subjugate the republic and wrest control of Sarajevo, they called Mladić.
The Republika Srpska army that he led was equipped and sponsored from Belgrade by Milošević, whose ultimate aim was to create a Greater Serbia in the wreckage of Yugoslavia. But how Mladić went about that was left up to him, and his ethnic bigotry and sadism was allowed to run rampant.
In 1992, his forces took control of a horseshoe of territory in western and eastern Bosnia, slaughtering Muslims and Croats and setting up concentration camps. Of the estimated 100,000 dead from the Bosnian war, about 38,000 were civilians, and more than 80% of the civilian deaths were Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), a statistic that owes a lot to the single-mindedness with which Mladić went about his task.
Though ruthlessly effective in liquidating civilian populations, Mladić failed to overcome the improvised resistance put up by defenders of Sarajevo. Instead he oversaw a 47-month siege of the city (the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare), deploying mortars in the surrounding mountains and snipers in high-rise blocks in the suburbs, to pick off its citizens. “Pound them senseless!” he was heard to urge his men in one intercepted communication.
Mladić’s true vision of Serb dominance relied on the destruction and uprooting of competing ethnicities. Unlike the foppish Karadzić, who relished the attention of US and European statesmen seeking to broker a peace deal, the general had no time for foreigners. An American official once asked him if he had ever been abroad. “I went to Geneva once. I didn’t like the beer,” the general replied.
Almost single-handedly, Mladić killed off an effort to end the war in 1993 led by the US envoy Cyrus Vance and the former UK foreign secretary David Owen. Defying Karadzić, he convinced the Republika Srpska assembly to reject the Vance-Owen plan with a 45-minute display of nationalist bombast. He relished his brutal reputation, but it helped destroy his family. He had sought to ensure their safety by keeping them in Belgrade, but there Ana fell in love with a Serbian doctor, a human rights activist who was appalled at what was happening in Bosnia. He told her he would marry her only if she renounced her father. Trapped between romantic love and family loyalty, she took her father’s pistol from its display case one night in February 1994 and shot herself .
Mladić refused to acknowledge any responsibility, preferring conspiracy theories and sinking into an ever darker view of the world and his place in it, as a Serb avenger for centuries-old Ottoman tyranny. When he led his troops into Srebrenica, a UN safe haven, he proclaimed the conquest was “a gift to the Serb people”.
“Finally, the time has come to take revenge on the Turks in this region,” Mladić declared to a camera held by one of his aides.
He had convinced himself that he belonged among the pantheon of greats of military history, a student of Hannibal, Alexander the Great and Carl von Clausewitz, but his army crumpled rapidly when in 1995 western forces finally intervened on the side of Croatian and Bosnian forces in the wake of the Srebrenica genocide.
Mladić escaped justice for more than 16 years. He was sheltered across the border in Serbia, where a special army unit was created to ensure he lived in comfort and secrecy at a succession of military bases. After the fall of Milošević in 2000, when Serbia embarked on what turned out to be a brief flirtation with liberalism and pro-western governments, Mladić’s protection fell away, forcing him to trust a constantly shrinking circle of loyalists, as he moved from one hideout to another, each more squalid than the one beforer.
He was finally found in May 2011 by Serbian police in an outbuilding of a farm belonging to one of his cousins in the village of Lazarevo, near the border with Romania. The muttering old man they stumbled across was scarcely recognisable, but he told them: “You have found who you’re looking for.”
Transported to The Hague, he spat defiance at his trial before the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and his disruptive antics meant he was excluded from the court when the verdict was delivered in November 2017 : guilty of one count of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four of violations of the laws or customs of war.
In prison in the Netherlands, many convicted Serb, Croat and Bosniak war criminals forged a strange jailhouse camaraderie. Mladić remained a stubborn exception, keeping to himself.
As his health declined, his legal team sought to win his release on humanitarian grounds, but the court in The Hague ruled in July 2025 that he was receiving adequate care in the Dutch prison. His incarceration was scant recompense for his victims, and the judges were reluctant to cut it short.
• Ratko Mladić, military commander, born 12 March 1943; death announced 27 August 2026
He told them: “Anyone who wants to leave will be transported, be they old or young. Don’t be afraid and don’t rush. Let the women and children go first.”
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Julian Borger. Published 27 Aug 2026, 05:11 pm.
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