Mladić's body landed in Belgrade: a genocide conviction does not change according to who is standing on the bridge

A government plane landed at Belgrade airport shortly before 6pm. On board - a flag-draped coffin, his son Darko, his granddaughter Anastasija and two military escorts. The convoy then crossed the city towards the Military Medical Academy, and people were standing on the bridges. Some with three fingers raised, some simply in silence. The Balkans was again watching a scene it knows by heart.

Ratko Mladić died on 27 August in detention in The Hague, aged 84. He died in prison, which he entered after the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found him guilty in 2017 on ten of eleven counts - among them genocide, crimes against humanity, extermination, murder and terrorising civilians. In June 2021 the appeal was rejected and the life sentence became final. Before that he had spent 15 years as a fugitive, hidden in the country that is burying him today.

A verdict is not an item open to interpretation

This is the part that always gets lost in the retelling. The court did not rule that Mladić "fought a hard war" or that he "made mistakes". It ruled that he commanded an operation in which more than 8,000 Bosniaks were executed near Srebrenica over a few days in July 1995, and that he held a city under siege for three and a half years. That is the fact. That fact does not change according to who is standing on the bridge, nor according to which flag the coffin is draped in.

And around that fact a ceremony is now being built. The commemoration is scheduled for Saturday at noon at the Army Hall in Belgrade. The funeral is on Monday at Topčider cemetery, and beforehand the body will lie in the church of Saint Luke at Košutnjak, where citizens will be able to pay respects from 9am to 12:30. The service at 12:35, then the procession. A schedule written with the precision of a state protocol, for a man who died a convicted génocidaire.

Who is organising this?

That is a question worth asking, because the answer is not neutral. The Army Hall is not a private venue. When a state institution opens its doors for the commemoration of a convicted war criminal, that is not a family matter - it is a message, and that message is read in Sarajevo, in Zagreb, in Pristina and here.

The region is not made up of separate states watching separate television. Everything that happens in Belgrade is seen in Sarajevo the same day, with the same intensity and with an entirely opposite emotion. Every scene like this pushes the temperature back to levels that diplomacy then has to work on for months.

And that is where the real problem lies. Nobody disputes that a family wants to bury its own - that right is not being contested. What is contested is when a funeral stops being a funeral and becomes a political stage, with institutions lending it their weight. Anyone who has lived even once in this half of Europe knows the difference between those two things.

Thirty years on, the Balkans still has not agreed on what happened. The court agreed. The lists of the killed exist. The graves have been exhumed and the bodies identified by DNA. But the fact that something has been proven in court is evidently not enough to stop it being negotiated in public squares. How many more generations have to pass before a verdict means a verdict?