Serbia's Mourning: Europe Just Lost the Argument
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Belgrade to honour Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo — crimes that killed more than eight thousand people in a single week in 1995.
Serbia's Mourning: Europe Just Lost the Argument
Tens of thousands of people gathered in Belgrade to honour Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide for his role in the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo — crimes that killed more than eight thousand people in a single week in 1995. The funeral drew crowds that Serbian state media framed as a farewell to a national hero. The European Union framed it differently, issuing a formal warning to Belgrade not to glorify a man the International Criminal Tribunal sentenced to life imprisonment, per BBC News.
The images from Belgrade will travel far. Serbia has been a candidate for EU membership for over a decade. The accession process has moved slowly, stalled by rule-of-law concerns and precisely this kind of political signal — the kind that tells Brussels whether a government is moving toward European values or performing distance from them for a domestic audience.
Mladić died in prison in The Hague in April 2024. That he is being buried now as something resembling a martyr is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is a test of how seriously Europe can enforce the terms of its own memory.
The EU has leverage. It has not always chosen to use it. Belgrade is watching to see if this time is different. So is Sarajevo. So, quietly, is every capital that still believes the tribunal in The Hague meant something permanent.
Some monuments are built in stone. Others are built in crowds.
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*By Ryan C, Real Estate & Urban Life Correspondent, News Beast by FreeMalta.com*
