{"id":222245,"date":"2026-08-28T03:27:55","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T03:27:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ratko-mladic-the-butcher-of-bosnia-dies-in-the-hague-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T03:27:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T03:27:55","slug":"ratko-mladic-the-butcher-of-bosnia-dies-in-the-hague-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/ratko-mladic-the-butcher-of-bosnia-dies-in-the-hague-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"Ratko Mladi\u0107, the \u2018Butcher of Bosnia\u2019, dies in The Hague – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocide
From the archive:
Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia <\/a>
Ratko Mladi\u0107 will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you\u2019ll see that he won<\/a>
Ratko Mladi\u0107, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for genocide committed during the Bosnian war, has died in prison in The Hague.
Mladi\u0107 had been one of the main architects of the policy of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war. He was convicted of genocide<\/a> for orchestrating the 1995 killing of at least 8,000 Muslims in the UN-designated \u201csafe area\u201d Srebrenica<\/a>, the worst massacre in Europe since the second world war.
Mladi\u0107, who was nicknamed the \u201cButcher of Bosnia\u201d, had been in ill health after having a series of strokes.
A UN international tribunal confirmed Mladi\u0107\u2019s death, saying he had died in hospital in The Hague earlier in the day.
\u201cMladi\u0107 passed away today while hospitalised in The Hague,\u201d the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals said in a statement, adding that judge Graciela Gatti Santana had ordered \u201ca full inquiry into the circumstances\u201d of his death.
Described by the former UN rights chief Zeid Ra\u2019ad al-Hussein as \u201cthe epitome of evil\u201d after his conviction, Mladi\u0107 was one of the most notorious figures<\/a> of the war that killed more than 100,000 people and left more than 1 million homeless.
He commanded his troops to \u201cscorch the brains\u201d of Bosnian Muslim people and had boasted of being a \u201cSerbian god\u201d.
The news of Mladi\u0107\u2019s death was first broken on Serbian state television after his son, Darko, had spoken earlier about his father\u2019s declining health.
Mladi\u0107 was sentenced by a UN tribunal to life imprisonment in 2017 over genocide and war crimes committed during Bosnia\u2019s 1990s war. He was arrested in Serbia in 2011 after 16 years on the run.
The slaughter in Srebrenica was the culmination of a brutal war that had lasted more than three \u2060years, during which Mladi\u0107 oversaw the siege of Bosnia\u2019s capital, Sarajevo, which was pounded daily by artillery, tank and sniper fire, killing 10,000 people.
The goal of the Serbian leadership, which Mladi\u0107 was tasked with implementing \u2013 as determined \u2060by the UN\u2019s international criminal tribunal for \u2060the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) \u2013 was the forcible expulsion of \u200bBosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian land for the creation of a greater Serbia.
The tribunal found that Mladi\u0107, together with the late Serbian president Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and the Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.
\u201cI do not recognise this court,\u201d Mladi\u0107 said at an \u2060ICTY hearing on his case in 2014. When he was sentenced, he shouted: \u201cThis is all lies, you are all liars!\u201d
The Serbian campaign culminated in the horror of Srebrenica when, after the withdrawal of Dutch UN peacekeeping forces, thousands of Bosnian men and boys were rounded up, killed and their bodies bulldozed into mass graves.
Mladi\u0107 had the siege filmed to show him praising his \u201clads\u201d and haranguing the UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands.
\u201cWe give this town to the Serb people as a gift,\u201d Mladi\u0107 said to the camera, claiming the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who had once held the area as part \u200cof the Ottoman empire.
The next day, Mladi\u0107\u2019s forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage. Meanwhile, thousands of men and boys were being readied for slaughter.
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When Nato tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets.
The son of a second world war partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladi\u0107 was, according to his family, born in March 1943 in the tiny Bosnian village of Bozinovici, putting his age at death at 83 (though official documents recorded his date of birth a year earlier, in 1942).
Mladi\u0107 was an officer in the communist Yugoslav People\u2019s Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia\u2019s disintegration began in 1991.
When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia\u2019s Muslim-led secession, Mladi\u0107 was chosen to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70% of the country.
Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA and villages were burned down, as 22,000 troops with the UN Protection Force stood by, more or less helplessly, under orders not to take sides.
A combination of western pressure, Nato strikes and covert US arms and training for Croats and \u2060Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladi\u0107\u2019s army. After the war, Mladi\u0107 went into hiding, with the reformists ruling post-conflict Serbia not daring \u200bto move against a man who was a hero to a core of nationalist Serbs.
Mladi\u0107 continued to insist he was \u201ca simple man\u201d chosen to protect his people. When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance. He had a heart \u200battack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. By his own account, he felt like a frail old man.
This month, a UN doctor said Mladi\u0107\u2019s death \u201cmay occur at any time\u201d, possibly within weeks, but his application for release was again rejected.
Munira Suba\u0161i\u0107, from the Mothers of Srebrenica group, said she deplored that Mladi\u0107\u2019s crimes were still being denied by many Bosnian Serbs. \u201cToday, a major war criminal died, the criminal of the Balkans,\u201d Suba\u0161i\u0107 said. But while 31 years later mothers of victims were \u201cstill carrying the pain in our souls \u2026 we are still listening to denials, we are still listening to how Ratko Mladi\u0107 was a hero for the Serbs\u201d.
Elizabeth Evenson, the international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said: \u201cThe death of Ratko Mladi\u0107, the former Bosnian Serb army commander found guilty of genocide, including the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica, Bosnia, in July 1995, is a reminder of the ongoing need for justice, truth, and reparations in the western Balkans.
\u201cFull accountability for such terrible crimes, in Bosnia and elsewhere, demands commitment by governments to justice, even decades after the events themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bosnian Serb commander responsible for Srebrenica massacre dies in prison while serving life sentence for genocideFrom the archive:Fourteen years a fugitive: the hunt for the Butcher of Bosnia Ratko Mladi\u0107 will die in jail. But go to Bosnia: you\u2019ll see that he wonRatko Mladi\u0107, the infamous Serbian general who was serving a life sentence for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":222246,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/222246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}