“Praising him after his death is incompatible with the values on which the path to the EU is based,” M. Kos wrote online, adding that “in this context I have decided not to hold my planned visit.”
The remains of former Bosnian Serb military leader and convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić, who died last week, were brought to Serbia on Thursday, where they were received with military honors.
The coffin, draped with the Serbian flag, was carried out of the plane arriving from The Hague by six soldiers, accompanied by R. Mladić’s son Darko and Serbia’s Minister of Justice Nenad Vujić.
The Serbian authorities promised that R. Mladić would “receive all military and state ceremonies he is entitled to” during the funeral.
R. Mladić’s family and the Serbian government repeatedly requested his release due to his age and poor health. He died a week after the UN rejected his last request for release on humanitarian grounds.
R. Mladić had suffered several strokes in recent months.
84-year-old R. Mladić was nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian war.
Read more Expecting a visit from US envoys, at least three people were killed in Russian strikes in Ukraine
R. Mladić served a life sentence in The Hague for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
With the collapse of communism and the former Yugoslavia descending into bloody conflict, he was the military face of a brutal trio politically led by former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.
The 1992–1995 war claimed about 100,000 lives, and 2.2 million people were forced to leave their homes.
The most horrific brutality was carried out in Srebrenica, where Serb forces under R. Mladić’s command killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who sought refuge in an enclave that was supposed to be protected by the United Nations.
Read more FAO: food prices worldwide have risen to the highest level since 2022
