Serbia formally bid farewell to Ratko Mladić, who was sentenced in The Hague to life imprisonment for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, without a state funeral. Yet the state organized the transport of his body, the military took part in the ceremony, the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church officiated at the service, and ruling-party structures organized “spontaneous” gatherings along the route. The funeral thus became a political spectacle that reveals not only how far the authorities are willing to push boundaries, but also how much society is willing to accept such conduct.
The state-organized funeral of Ratko Mladić, commander-in-chief of the Serb forces during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, has rightly drawn public attention in Serbia and internationally. Mladić was a military commander who, at the time of his death, was serving a life sentence imposed on him in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes and crimes against humanity, as well as for genocide in Srebrenica. The funeral drew attention because of its sheer scale and its de facto state character, which fell short of a fully official form in only a few details. The direct involvement of the Serbian state was most visible in the army's active participation in the memorial events and the burial. A barely concealed state tribute to the deceased was evident in the presence of a number of government ministers, attending "as private individuals." In the spirit of the "symphonia" between altar and state leadership, the funeral service was conducted personally by the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The ruling party, which long ago usurped the state and its mechanisms, organized its phalanxes to "spontaneously" greet, from overpasses and along the road, the vehicle carrying Ratko Mladić's body from Belgrade airport. The body had been flown there from the Netherlands on a Government of Serbia aircraft, accompanied by the Minister of Justice.
In this commentary, I will first point to several precedents showing that such conduct by the Serbian government and part of the Serbian public is not unique in Europe, although it does display certain unsettling specificities. I will then consider the broader circumstances that made such an event possible without stronger public resistance. Finally, I will turn to the specifics of the current political context that served as a catalyst for the inappropriate spectacle we have witnessed.
Precedents
Several elements together constitute an event with no substantively comparable precedent in recent history. These are the extent of the participation of the Serbian state and its institutions in the funeral of a person convicted of crimes under international criminal and humanitarian law, the officiating of the highest church leader, and the presence of several thousand citizens. The Archive of Public Gatherings (Arhiv javnih skupova), an organization that monitors public assemblies, estimated attendance at around 16,000. Admittedly, there have been comparable situations, but their "controversiality" falls short of the event discussed here. I do not intend to suggest any equivalence in terms of ideological profiles, the scale of crimes, or any other parallels, since such comparisons always carry a risk of anachronism or relativization in historical accounts. Even so, one dimension is clearly comparable across different contexts: the attitude of the state and the public toward persons convicted of crimes at the moment of their death.
As is well known, the senior Nazi military and civilian officials sentenced to death at Nuremberg were for the most part left without a known grave. By contrast, individuals who served fixed prison terms and completed them were, after their deaths, usually buried within the family circle, with modest funeral rites. One exception, which comes somewhat closer to the funeral of Ratko Mladić, is the funeral of Admiral Karl Dönitz, Hitler's successor at the head of the Third Reich. However, the parallel lies primarily in the event as a public (not state) manifestation and in the presence of several thousand citizens and Dönitz's comrades-in-arms, Wehrmacht veterans. Any involvement of the German state was entirely absent in this case. Moreover, the German authorities of the time explicitly ordered that Dönitz be denied all the military honors that an officer of his rank would otherwise have been entitled to. No active-duty service member was permitted to appear at the funeral in uniform, an order some officers ignored. In short, the funeral of Karl Dönitz, who was convicted after the end of the war, was a relatively large event. It included the appropriate church ritual and an honor guard of veterans holding high military decorations, and it took place under the sign of informally expressed high esteem for the deceased top Nazi official. Yet somewhat earlier, in 1973, one of the field marshals of the Third Reich, Erich von Manstein, had been buried in Germany with military honors; he had been sentenced to a multi-year prison term in 1949. There was a clear difference in the treatment of these two convicted Wehrmacht officers. Although both held high rank, Dönitz's membership in Hitler's innermost circle and in the leadership of the Third Reich was an insurmountable obstacle to granting him official posthumous honors.
A more recent example is the funeral of Croatian general Slobodan Praljak, who was convicted in The Hague. General Praljak's body was transported to Zagreb under special measures and with the utmost discretion. A private farewell at Mirogoj cemetery was held among family and closest friends, in accordance with Praljak's own wishes. However, the main public act of tribute was organized by the Croatian Generals' Assembly (Hrvatski generalski zbor), an association of retired generals, at the Vatroslav Lisinski concert hall in Zagreb. The commemoration was attended by around 2,000 people. Among them, though not in the capacity of official state representatives, were the then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, the Minister of Croatian Veterans, and the Deputy Speaker of the Croatian Parliament. Numerous other members of parliament, former senior political officials, and generals also attended, including several prominent figures from Croatia's military and veterans-political establishment. On the same day, a senior church dignitary (a bishop) celebrated a requiem mass, attended by numerous generals, war veterans, and other public figures from Croatian politics. The active military was not involved in the event. Even the participation of a choir made up of active service members was not approved, precisely so that the active military would not be associated with the convicted man.
There have been other comparable examples in the past, especially if one includes figures who remained unconvicted for crimes that can clearly be attributed to them. The circumstances were generally similar: over time, the retributive character of the attitude toward such a figure weakened, and conviction and punishment usually did not extend post mortem, in the form of a secret burial or the scattering of ashes at an unknown location. The exception in this respect is Rudolf Hess, whose remains were first buried at a known location and later relocated so that the burial site would not become a gathering place for neo-Nazis.
As far as Serbia is concerned, a precedent had already been set with the burial of General Nebojša Pavković in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens. That funeral had a somewhat more official character than Mladić's, with the highest military honors and the official presence of state officials, including an envoy of the President of the Republic. With the funerals of Nebojša Pavković and Ratko Mladić, given the way these events were organized, the Serbian authorities and the part of the Serbian public that took part in them have gone further than in any previous comparable case. They did so in terms of state involvement, scale, and above all the publicity given to these events.
The Broader Context
The main political and social precondition for the state's deep involvement in organizing the funerals of convicted military commanders from the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia is a persistently encouraged and widespread belief in Serbia. According to this belief, Serbs were the greatest victims of those wars, and all convictions of members of the Serb side are anti-Serb fabrications or tendentious exaggerations. This is the message continuously communicated by every source of public authority: state officials, most of the intellectual public, and the Serbian Orthodox Church. Dissenting voices are not merely drowned out. Everyone who dares to speak on these issues contrary to the privileged view is publicly discredited, accused of anti-Serb activity, and subjected to aggressive propaganda and verbal violence, which occasionally escalates into physical violence. One journalist has even received a death threat.
In such an environment, any meaningful debate that might call into question the "sacred truths" is not only futile but impossible. These truths concern the alleged lack of objectivity, political bias, anti-Serb orientation, and instrumentalization of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Both judicial institutions established that the crime in Srebrenica constituted genocide, a finding firmly rejected in Serbia by most of the public that holds any view on the matter. Moreover, even the criminal offence of genocide denial has been drafted in Serbian criminal legislation very carefully and deliberately, so as to exclude the possibility of punishing denial of the Srebrenica genocide. The concept of "dealing with the past" has been promoted almost exclusively through the activities of civil society organizations. In Serbia it has produced very limited results, reduced to individual insights and an almost privatized sense of reverence for the victims, without any public articulation.
The attitude toward the Srebrenica genocide is a particularly telling illustration of this atmosphere. Even when it is "acknowledged" that a crime took place, incomparably more condemnation is directed at those who characterize that crime as genocide than at those who committed it or who deny it, even while glorifying those responsible. Individuals and organizations that consistently advocate respect for the judgments of the Hague tribunal are disqualified far more harshly and far more often than the perpetrators of the crime are criticized, whatever the specific legal qualification may be. And one question in particular arises: why is the qualification "crime against humanity," the alternative qualification of the Srebrenica crime, so much more "appealing" to genocide deniers? What would change in their attitude toward the crime if its qualification were different? These questions are, unfortunately, rhetorical.
For decades, the main "argument" in Serbia that the Srebrenica crime was not genocidal in character has been that Bosniak women and children were not killed, or that the ethnic group of Srebrenica Bosniaks was not destroyed as a whole. The argument is meaningless if only because the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provides that genocide can be committed against part of a protected group, a point on which the courts have given very detailed reasoning. It is sometimes claimed that the Srebrenica crime was an act of retaliation for the killing of the Serb population. This, again, is an argument without any legal relevance: genocide can be committed even as an act of defence, and retaliation hardly merits discussion. In general, the legal reasoning is very little known to the public, while historical and national-emotional content is widely manipulated. This approach presupposes, of course, the complete public discrediting of the relevant international courts. Under such circumstances, legal argumentation is simply irrelevant.
Under such circumstances, and with the exception of Srebrenica, the attitude toward crimes for which Serb forces and their commanders are responsible is characterized primarily by near-total public silence in Serbia. Domestic court verdicts for war crimes are probably the least communicated output of any state body. Cooperation with the Hague tribunal is implicitly understood as an imposed obligation, a kind of international blackmail that Serbia accepted because it had no other choice. This has produced an atmosphere in which every member of the opposing side's armed forces is implicitly a criminal, while every member of the Serb forces is either innocent or all but forced into committing a crime by various turns of circumstance. The usual mantra involves an "objective" confesion that "there were crimes on our side too." However, knowledge of those crimes, or any unequivocal ethical distancing from them, is almost entirely absent, apart from the trite and unconvincing "condemnation of all crimes." How exactly does Serbian society confront these "crimes of ours"? What exactly is the ethical distance being established from, when both the crimes and their perpetrators are at best unknown to the public, while the known ones are excused in every possible way? What real effect does an abstract condemnation of "all crimes" have, without any concreteness that would give the position meaning, awaken empathy with the victims, and take a clear stance on the act itself and its perpetrators?
At the root of this attitude toward the wars and the crimes which were committed lies a perspective whose deep entrenchment is inversely proportional to its ethical and intellectual shallowness. This is the unconditional privileging of national-identity commitments, which are placed above every universal ethical principle. In terms of values and ethics, the national not only precedes every other consideration but becomes the only recognized value, even more so the greater its divergence from other considerations. Few, of course, will openly admit this, but the vast majority live out this lamentable proportion, blissfully convinced of the moral and ethical superiority of their own group. This unquestioned belief is not relativised in the slightest. On the contrary, it is reinforced by the abstract phrase "there were crimes on our side too." This "generous" phrase serves only one purpose. It strips the prior belief in one's own moral superiority of the implausibility, the absurd unconvincingness, and the almost psychopathic detachment from reality that its absolutization inevitably entails, even from the perspective of the most impartial individual. In reality, however, the cognitive mechanism of this construct functions precisely without any concrete content behind that admission.
None of the above necessarily applies to the majority of society. It is in fact unlikely that most people sincerely participate in such a construction of reality. A model of conformism, combined with consciously chosen or unconsciously adopted indifference, is a far more convincing explanation. The problem for society, however, lies in those moments when circumstances force people to take a position. At such moments, there is no one to effectively oppose the privileged paradigm.
The Specific Context
Serbia's current ruling structures are not merely beneficiaries of the situation described above; they are among its active creators. The ruling clique's media machinery continuously, persistently, daily, and around the clock reproduces content that reinforces ethnocentric and moralizing nationalist attitudes on every socially relevant issue. In this way the ruling structure achieves two goals: the complete marginalization of opposing views, and the sidelining of those actors who claim to represent the same principles more authentically. In this respect, the government and its nationalist alternative are structurally engaged in the same task and share the same views. The specific current context in which Ratko Mladić's funeral should be viewed is largely shaped by their concrete relationship.
Ratko Mladić's funeral should therefore be viewed in light of the context outlined above, with current political circumstances in Serbia acting as a catalyst that further accentuated clearly recognizable tendencies. The ruling political organization is facing its strongest challenge ever from a political grouping built on a catch-all principle, which has managed to win over a large number of right-leaning voters. Until now, the current regime had managed to distribute this segment of the electorate among several obviously "satellite" political groupings that posed as the opposition. In the new balance of power, the regime lost this "ace up its sleeve," so an important aspect of its campaign has been to strengthen its own position as radically right-wing. In this respect, Ratko Mladić's death was a more than welcome opportunity for the regime to gain a political advantage among a large part of the right-leaning electorate. The regime quite literally exploited Mladić's death in The Hague and staged a morbid political rally. Regime media broadcast it, with the fitting tears of on-call analysts and salvos of praise for the president and his party for consistently standing by the "Serbian hero." Not a single word was said in the media about the absence of Serbia's president from this political funeral. This was evidently a line that, out of international considerations, the president did not dare to cross, despite his chest-thumping claims that he fears no one and nothing in these relations. Vučić himself offered the official explanation that he would not attend the funeral because of a meeting with the President of Uzbekistan.
The welcoming crowds for the vehicle carrying Mladić's dead body, organized on overpasses and along the route from Belgrade airport to its destination, point to coordination between state bodies and party phalanxes. How else could these groups have known the time, manner, and route of the transport? They were made up of familiar faces, the kind seen at every rally of the ruling party or in the squads of provocateurs who attack anti-government protesters. By lighting flares, displaying banners, and through their overall iconography, these groups sent society a clear message that they were acting in concert with the regime, which was giving the "hero" such a magnificent welcome. The same images dominated the funeral itself, multiplied by the participation of an almost exclusively male crowd, which also points to a kind of orchestration. However much the funeral of a military commander may be a "male event," such a minimal presence of women who might feel the need to pay their respects to the deceased also seems "unnatural." Can women not be admirers of such a "national figure"? Somewhat unusual on the front line, women are hardly as unexpected when it comes to paying last respects to a person they revere, even a general.
Finally, the current regime also found Mladić's funeral useful as an opportunity to send a message to external actors. The regime made it clear that it can easily play the card of nationalist frustration alone. Aware that this choice poses a challenge for Europe, regardless of the balance of power, the regime deliberately put Western balancing to the test. The West must weigh the unacceptability of an event such as Mladić's funeral against its interest in integrating Serbia into the Western political, economic, and security framework. Correctly judging that this interest exists, the regime keeps pushing the boundaries of its own conduct within Serbia, testing what Western actors are prepared to accept or tolerate.
In short, Mladić's funeral has so far been the furthest extent of the regime's divergence from Western actors, a divergence whose purpose is primarily domestic, but which is at the same time part of the tradition of boundary-pushing in relations with the West. Such opportunistic political calculation amounts to predatory behaviour and the instrumentalisation of a dead body, unacceptable even when the funeral is of a person convicted of the crimes for which Ratko Mladić was convicted.
Conclusion
Even once we understand the regime's immediate motivation for organizing such a rally in the way described, a meta-problem remains: the state of a society in which "political points" can be won in this way, or at least not lost. Every society in which the national-identity paradigm is privileged (and it usually is) occasionally "breaks out" of universal ethical norms and prioritizes the particular (national) over the universal (humanist). In Serbia's case, however, this disproportion is pronounced and exists in a constant dynamic equilibrium, in which the national-identity dimension clashes very dramatically with the universal-humanist one, to the detriment of the latter. The historical precedents presented here show that the state has put its resources and its credibility behind a person convicted of the gravest crimes, on a scale recorded nowhere else in recent history. What gives cause for concern is how thoroughly society has been "numb" for such acts. Alongside it comes a conspicuous, if tacit, admission that foreign-policy considerations are the only obstacle to the complete and official glorification of war criminals through the usual forms of commemoration and public recognition: naming streets and other public spaces after them, erecting monuments, and introducing them into school curricula.
