Crowds gather for war criminal Ratko Mladic’s funeral in Belgrade

BACKLASH

Mladic’s casket arrived in the country last week aboard a government plane, where it had been carried by six soldiers and draped in flags.

As it was driven from the airport in a motorcade, groups of young men held banners praising the former general, and some police were seen saluting as it passed.

Last week’s scenes drew condemnation from the European Union’s enlargement commissioner, Marta Kos, who cancelled a forthcoming visit to Serbia on Friday, saying the “glorification surrounding his death is incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built”.

Denis Becirovic, chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, called it “an act of identification by Serbia’s leadership with one of the worst killers in European history”.

“This has unforeseeable consequences for the future of the entire region,” he wrote on Facebook on Friday.

Mladic’s wartime atrocities during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia earned him the nickname “Butcher of Bosnia” in international media.

The 1992-1995 war left around 100,000 people dead and displaced 2.2 million.

Mladic was the military figurehead of the Bosnian Serb leadership alongside former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

The United Nations war crimes court convicted him of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where Bosnian Serb forces killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a UN-protected safe zone.

The atrocity was Europe’s worst act of bloodshed since World War II.

Fadila Efendic, whose son and husband were killed in Srebrenica, told AFP earlier that it pained her “to know that his ideas are not dead”.

Mladic was also convicted of persecuting and forcibly expelling Bosnian Muslims and Croats, terrorising civilians during the siege of Sarajevo and taking UN peacekeepers hostage during NATO air strikes in 1995.