Ratko Mladic, the former military commander known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” who was convicted for crimes against humanity and genocide during the 1990s war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has died. He was 84.
Mladic died while serving a life sentence in The Hague, Netherlands, Serbian state broadcaster RTS reported on Thursday.
Mladic led Serb forces in the ethnic fighting among Bosnia's Muslims, Serbs and Croats that left more than 100,000 dead and more than 2 million people displaced, in what was Europe's deadliest conflict since World War II until Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The war was part of the larger ethnic conflicts triggered by the breakup of Yugoslavia following the fall of the Soviet Union.
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After eluding arrest for almost 16 years, Mladic was captured in Serbia in 2011 and extradited to the Hague to face the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He claimed his innocence, and almost 400 prosecution and defense witnesses testified at a trial that started in 2012.
In 2017, he was found guilty on 10 of 11 counts, including that he had “significantly contributed” to the genocide of as many as 8,000 Muslim men in the eastern town of Srebrenica in 1995. Other charges stemmed from the 44-month siege of Sarajevo and the taking of UN peacekeepers as hostages.
Mladic's lawyers appealed the verdict in March 2018. Their final appeal was rejected in 2021, and Mladic's sentence of life imprisonment was confirmed.
The Bosnian Serb civilian leader, Radovan Karadzic, was also found guilty of genocide and nine other counts of war crimes and sentenced to life in jail. He was transferred to a UK prison in 2021.
Mladic's family and lawyers claimed that his health deteriorated due to inadequate medical care during his imprisonment. His request to serve the remainder of his sentence in Serbia on humanitarian grounds was denied in 2024.
Military Academy
Born in Bosnia on March 12, 1942 — some sources said 1943 — Mladic was two when his father was killed fighting Croats who were allied with Nazi Germany.
He graduated from the Military Academy in Belgrade in 1965 at the top of his class.
As an officer in the Yugoslav People's Army, Mladic fought in Croatia and Bosnia as part of the effort to keep those two republics from leaving Yugoslavia. He was stationed in what was then the Republic of Macedonia, the southernmost federal state, and in Kosovo, then a Serb province where tensions were rising between Serbs and ethnic Albanians.
He moved to Croatia in 1991 after that republic declared independence. He led a Serb uprising against the secession and was promoted to major general.
He then went to Bosnia, which declared independence in 1992. He headed the military campaign by Bosnian Serbs who wanted to stay allied with Serbia, the biggest of the six Yugoslav republics.
Muslim Enclaves
Under his command, Bosnia's ethnic Serbs seized control of more than two-thirds of the country. In 1995, his troops overran the Muslim enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa in eastern Bosnia. Dutch peacekeepers deployed there as part of a UN force failed to prevent the massacre, the worst mass murder in Europe in decades.
After a late 1995 peace pact ended the Bosnian war, Mladic moved to Serbia, where he lived under the protection of its then-leader, Slobodan Milosevic. When Milosevic was ousted in 2000 and extradited to the UN court for his role in the wars, Mladic went into hiding. (Milosevic died while on trial in 2006, before a verdict.)
Serbian authorities insisted they could not locate Mladic, even with a reward of €10 million ($12 million) for a tip on his whereabouts. He was eventually found hiding in a cousin's modest farmhouse in rural Serbia.
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In his first court appearance, Mladic dismissed the charges against him as “obnoxious” and said he had defended his ethnic kin against a violent land grab triggered by Yugoslavia's collapse.
He also said he was in poor health after suffering multiple strokes. With his speech slurred and an arm partially paralyzed, he was a shadow of the once feared military commander.
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