Mladic Gets a State Funeral: Serbia Lied About It

A war criminal who oversaw the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995 was buried in Serbia with government ministers in attendance and state television running tributes. The Serbian government called it a private funeral. It was not private. It was a statement.

Ratko Mladic, convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and serving a life sentence when he died, was mourned by thousands in the streets of Belgrade. Government officials who attended did not resign before going. They went as themselves, in their capacity as members of a government that still collects EU pre-accession funds and still presents itself, in Brussels meeting rooms, as a country committed to European values. The European Union, which has been negotiating Serbia's accession for over a decade, has not yet responded with anything that costs Serbia anything.

This matters for Malta because Malta sits inside the EU. Malta votes on enlargement. Malta's foreign policy, such as it is, operates within a bloc that is now watching a candidate country conduct a de facto state rehabilitation of a man the bloc's own courts convicted of genocide. The question is not whether Serbia mourns its dead. The question is whether the EU has any red lines left, or whether accession candidates have learned that the lines are decorative.

What happened in Belgrade is not a cultural misunderstanding. The Serbian government knows exactly what Srebrenica means to international law, to Bosnia, to the families of 8,000 people whose remains are still being identified from mass graves. It did this anyway, in daylight, with ministers present and cameras rolling on state media.

There is a detail that does not appear in the official framing: one of the most common phrases in the tributes broadcast on Serbian state television was that Mladic "defended his people." The International Criminal Tribunal used a different word. Genocide has a legal definition, and Serbia's state media spent the weekend demonstrating that it prefers another one.

The EU's silence is its answer. And Malta's silence on the EU's silence is its own.