The glorification of Ratko Mladić should be incompatible with Serbia’s EU aspirati

Fifteen years ago, capturing Ratko Mladić and handing him to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) allowed Serbia to receive EU candidate status. On 7 September, the convicted war criminal responsible for the Srebrenica genocide and the siege of Sarajevo was buried in Belgrade at a funeral attended by thousands, treated like a national hero. 

On 27 August, Ratko Mladić, commander of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian war of the 1990s, died at the UN Detention Unit in The Hague, where he was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

Crowds gathered across Republika Srpska to mourn him. Similar scenes followed in Serbia, including a minute of silence during the Red Star–Partizan derby. Glorification on the streets replicated the behaviours of political authorities. On the day of his death, Bosnian Serb leaders attended a memorial service in Banja Luka; a week later, officials from both Serbia and Republika Srpska joined a commemoration in Belgrade. The Serbian government initially announced a state funeral before backtracking. 

Tactical compliance without genuine reform 

The EU played an important role in delivering justice by making Serbia’s membership prospects conditional on cooperation with the ICTY. Mladić’s arrest in 2011 earned Serbia candidate status a year later. But his extradition was not accompanied by domestic accountability or societal reflection. It established a pattern of mistaking tactical compliance for genuine reform that has been repeated since. 

The context did not help in advancing transitional justice. As the EU lost interest in enlargement, political attention to the region’s democratisation faded, clearing the way for historical revisionism. The rise of Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party in 2012 began a democratic deterioration that closed down the space for dialogue about the past. 

Even in 2011, thousands protested Mladić’s arrest, treating the general as a national hero. Authorities in Belgrade and Banja Luka echoed such narratives, denying the crimes of the 1990s and presenting them as a plot by the international community against the Serbian people. 

In 2021, Milorad Dodik, then the Serb member of the Bosnian Presidency, denounced the confirmation of Mladić’s conviction as “an attempt to create a myth about genocide that never occurred”, despite the EU’s urging of political leaders to cooperate and respect the rulings of international tribunals. The rhetoric intensified after the 2024 UN resolution on Srebrenica, with the campaign “Serbs are not a genocidal nation”.  

Control of the education system and the media has been indispensable to articulate this discourse: textbooks still ignore some of the crimes of the 1990s, and the Commission’s 2025 reports on Serbia and Bosnia acknowledge that curricula are politicised with biased narratives about the wars. 

The reaction to Mladić’s death was not spontaneous but the product of historical revisionism and a glorification culture built by both governments over years. 

Weakened EU leverage and absent red lines 

Challenging the official narrative today carries the risk of being branded a traitor. Nevertheless, some still do: journalist Danica Vučenić deplored Mladić’s glorification during the Belgrade Pride March last week. The pro-democratic mobilisations under way since 2024 offer a glimmer of hope that space for reflection about the past may be reopening. 

Mladić’s glorification also reflects the weakening of the EU’s leverage. Brussels failed to draw effective red lines when the Serbian government denied war crimes in Bosnia, or when a minister said she “would have ethnically cleansed Kosovo”. Meanwhile, the EU increasingly treats Serbia as a strategic partner for access to raw materials, while Serbia balances ties with Russia and the EU, exploiting its geopolitical position to extract concessions from Brussels. 

Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President António Costa both regretted the “elements of official support and the presence of senior Serbian officials” at Mladić’s funeral and recalled that they “contradict the values underpinning Serbia’s path towards the EU”. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos had cancelled a trip to Belgrade days earlier. Such statements are welcome, but actions need to follow.  

These episodes are a wake-up call about the need to genuinely frontload transitional justice in the accession process, rather than leave it to passing references under Chapter 23. Promoting an environment conducive to reconciliation and dealing with the past, including the prosecution of genocide denial, should feature in Serbia’s Cluster 1 interim benchmarks, just as it does among Bosnia’s 14 key priorities. It should also condition the disbursement of Growth Plan funds and of any successor instrument under the next MFF.  

The Commission should also reassess Chapter 26 on education and culture, opened and provisionally closed on the same day in 2017 on the grounds that there was little acquis to align with. That technical judgement ignored the political weight of what is taught in classrooms. Curriculum content is key to educating in democratic values and belongs in the fundamentals, and the forthcoming enlargement package is the place to say so.  

Dealing with the past, including providing justice for war crimes and promoting reconciliation, were among the pillars of the EU perspective granted to the Western Balkans in 2003. The glorification of war criminals, genocide denial and historical revisionism should be incompatible with EU aspirations.