The genocidaire Ratko Mladić is dead.
He died incarcerated, sickly, serving a life sentence in The Hague. He was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on 10 collective counts of genocide, persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts, terror, unlawful attacks on civilians and the taking of hostages. He was the military commander in charge of the organization and execution of the Srebrenica genocide, the first legally recognized instance of genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, and the architect of the siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital city in modern history.
He died incarcerated for having directed the murder, torture and expulsion of tens of thousands of children, women, seniors and prisoners of war. He did so because, like his political masters in Belgrade, the Bosnian Serb commander Mladić dreamed of a Bosnia and Herzegovina emptied of its majority Bosniak populace and incorporated into something they called “Greater Serbia.”
He died a coward. During the Bosnian War, members of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina nearly captured him in the field near Bužim, in northwestern Bosnia. Wounded and flustered by the collapse of the Serb nationalist lines, he fled with his handlers, abandoning his men so quickly that he left behind a heap of personal effects, including his purportedly “iconic” officer’s cap.
He died a coward, unlike Col. Avdo Palić, the Bosnian commander in charge of the Žepa pocket, a U.N. Safe Area in eastern Bosnia. The town spent 40 months under siege by Mladić’s forces. When Palić realized that Žepa would fall to the so-called “Army of the Republika Srpska” (VRS) in July 1995, only days before Srebrenica, another U.N. Safe Area, would likewise be overrun, and that no international assistance was coming, he secured the evacuation of nearly the entire civilian population of the town, and finally his own soldiers. Then, as part of a deal to secure the safety of the evacuees, he surrendered himself to Mladić’s forces.
We have the footage of his surrender. Flanked by hapless U.N. peacekeepers, Palić approaches a bemused VRS officer, extends his hand and offers with a smile: “I am that Avdo that you are looking for.” He was executed days later by the VRS, and his remains were not positively identified until 2009.
Ratko Mladić died a coward, unlike Aida Buturović, a librarian at the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo. When on Aug. 25, 1992, Mladić directed his forces to use incendiary shells to destroy the Hapsburg-era Vijećnica and the Ottoman-era Oriental Institute, which collectively housed hundreds of thousands of priceless books, newspapers, manuscripts and archives dating to Bosnia’s medieval period, Aida and her colleagues rushed into the flames to preserve the records of their country’s history and its centuries of interreligious life. Aida and her associates spent the entire night running in and out of this inferno, managing to save nearly a quarter of the National Library’s contents. Hours later, on her way home, she was struck down by one of the hundreds of VRS shells that fell on the city just that day.
Ratko Mladić died a coward. He abandoned his own family to more fully devote himself to destroying others. When his daughter, Ana, fell in love with a Serbian doctor “who was appalled at what was happening in Bosnia,” her partner urged her to renounce her war criminal father and his politics. On March 24, 1994, Ana shot herself with her father’s own service pistol. She was 23. Mladić was purportedly devastated by her death and sought solace in the killing of thousands of other parents and their children across Bosnia for nearly another two years.
Mladić died a coward. After the U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement had secured the reincorporation of the self-declared Republika Srpska (RS) as an “entity” into the postwar Bosnian state — despite Mladić’s efforts to graft these territories onto Serbia through systematic sexual violence, including against children, through mass executions, including of infants, through concentration camps, torture, and the destruction of all remnants of Bosniak life and culture across northern and eastern Bosnia — he fled. And for 16 years he scurried from hole to hole, protected by elements of the Serbian security apparatus. Until he was finally captured in May 2011 in a village in northeastern Serbia, closer to Romania than Bosnia. In pictures released after the fact, Mladić looked dumbfounded, a confused senior, a far cry from the swaggering warlord of the 1990s.
Mladić died a coward, much as his political progeny today still live as cowards. Those like the contemporary RS entity regime in Banja Luka which uses the local police and prosecutors’ office to further terrorize the Bosniak inhabitants of eastern Bosnia and the employees of the Srebrenica Memorial Center. Like those who torch, in the middle of the night, the businesses of Bosniak returnees, who deface their sacral sites and then bar their children from studying their own language, in their own country.
Ratko Mladić is dead, but Bosnia and Herzegovina is a sovereign, internationally recognized state whose capital, Sarajevo, is today one of the premier global destinations, a city of festivals and celebrations and life. Mladić may have sown death and carnage across wide swathes of Bosnia, but somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all school-aged children in the Srebrenica area over the past half decade are Bosniaks.
Mladić is dead, and Esmir Bajraktarević, a boy from Appleton, Wisconsin, whose parents fled the horrors of Srebrenica, scored the winning goal to take Bosnia and Herzegovina to its second World Cup appearance. That team’s success unleashed a month-long footballing holiday among Bosnians from every corner of the Earth, and disseminated across the globe a picture of a people and a country not defined by their suffering but by their joy and humor.