Belgrade Buries Mladic: A War Criminal Gets a Hero's Send-Off

Thousands of people filed through a church in Belgrade on Monday to pay their respects to Ratko Mladic — a man convicted of genocide, a man who ordered the slaughter of more than eight thousand Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, a man who died in a prison cell in The Hague. They came with flowers. Some came with tears. Serbia gave him a funeral that looked, from the outside, like a state farewell for a general who had won something.

It is one of the quieter fault lines of 2026 that this was allowed to happen at all. No sitting Serbian minister stood at the altar. The government kept its formal distance. But the crowd was real, and the grief — or whatever it was that brought people out in that number — was real too. In the western Balkans, the architecture of historical memory is still being contested, stone by stone, and what happened in Belgrade tells you more about where Europe's eastern edges remain than any border negotiation could.

Meanwhile, in the South China Sea, Manila is watching a different kind of reassertion with familiar unease. The Philippines' defence chief has warned that China may use any perceived reduction in American military commitment — specifically cuts to US-South Korea joint drills — to push further into contested waters. Washington offered what officials in Manila described as "definite assurances" that the alliance holds. Assurances are not aircraft carriers, and the Philippines knows the difference. What makes the moment interesting is not the Chinese posture, which has been consistent for years, but the Filipino one: a small nation learning to speak loudly in rooms where it used to wait to be addressed.

These two stories — Belgrade's farewell to a war criminal and Manila's calibrated anxiety — are not connected by any obvious thread. But they share an undercurrent that runs beneath a great deal of what is happening globally right now: the question of what institutions actually hold, and who believes in them when the pressure rises. The International Criminal Court convicted Mladic. He died in its custody. Thousands of Serbs turned out to honour him anyway. ASEAN frameworks exist for the South China Sea. China sails through them anyway. The architecture is real. The friction is realer.

Somewhere above all of this, the disinformation layer keeps thickening. A fabricated video using Euronews footage claimed a Ukrainian soldier had killed three NATO servicemen at a military exercise in Latvia. It did not happen. The clip circulated widely before it was debunked — which is the point of such things. The target is not belief. The target is exhaustion. Make enough people uncertain enough about enough things, and the truth becomes just another opinion in a crowded room.

The stones of Valletta don't move. That, increasingly, feels like a kind of miracle.

*— Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*