The body of former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide and other atrocities during the Bosnian War, is scheduled to be flown to Serbia on Thursday, according to President Aleksandar Vucic. Mladic died last week while serving a life sentence at a hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, where the U.N. court handling his case is located.
Vucic stated that the U.N. court has released Mladic's body. The former commander's family is expected to announce funeral arrangements in the coming days. Serbian authorities anticipate a large turnout of Mladic's admirers, potentially numbering in the tens of thousands, which they predict will present significant security challenges. "It will be hard to secure and guarantee security to everybody," Vucic said.
Mladic was sentenced in 2017 by the U.N. tribunal for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of over 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, the prolonged siege of Sarajevo, and other war crimes, including the operation of concentration camps. The Srebrenica massacre, where Serb forces overran a U.N. "safe haven," killed men and boys and buried them in mass graves, was Europe's first acknowledged genocide after World War II.
Mladic was one of the most prominent figures of the Bosnian War, which resulted in over 100,000 deaths and displaced more than a million people before concluding with a U.S.-brokered peace agreement in 1995. Following Mladic's death last Thursday, thousands of Serbs held vigils and marches in his honor, drawing condemnation from victims' families and in the ethnically divided region.
Serbia, which supported Bosnian Serbs during the conflict, is pursuing European Union membership. President Vucic has previously criticized the West and the Hague tribunal, accusing them of solely blaming Serbs for war crimes and failing to deliver justice for Serb victims. He also criticized the court for not releasing Mladic on humanitarian grounds to die at home.