Ratko Mladic died in custody in The Hague after suffering several strokes. He was serving a life sentence, handed down in June 2022, for genocide in Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The man who commanded the Bosnian Serb army died convicted, not acquitted - and that is the one sentence in this whole story that leaves no room for interpretation.

And yet the interpretations arrived immediately. Andrija Mandic, Speaker of Montenegro's parliament and leader of the New Serb Democracy, posted on X that he had sent condolences to Darko Mladic, the general's son. Not as a private individual reaching out to a man who lost his father - but signed, with the party behind him named too.

He is not a private citizen, and that is the entire point

Croatian MEP Suncana Glavak responded sharply: she called the message shameful and unacceptable from a man who heads the parliament of a country that wants to join the EU. Her argument is not emotional but institutional - Mandic is not a private citizen, so his public messages carry political and institutional weight.

Glavak recalled that Mladic was convicted with final effect and sentenced to life imprisonment. When that is passed over in silence while the military rank is emphasised, genocide is being relativised. That is not a nuance. It is a choice made deliberately, and Montenegro cannot build a European future while abandoning the values the Union was founded on.

The man who said he dreamed of a world without weapons

The British public broadcaster's correspondent Allan Little published, that same day, a recollection of his first meeting with Mladic at the Lukavica barracks near Sarajevo. The general, he writes, held his hand for minutes, fixed him with a stare and claimed he dreamed of a world without weapons and without war. Little remembered him as fanatical, dangerously fanatical.

What followed those sentences is written down in the judgments: mass killings, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, forced deportations, the genocide in Srebrenica. Little also lost his cameraman, Tihomir Tunukovic, to Serb artillery.

Who pays for the weight of one post on X

In the Balkans we are used to the death of a convicted war criminal turning into a test - not for him, but for the living. Every public official who speaks that day says something about their own country, whether they intend to or not.

So the question is not how the Mladic family feels. The question is why a man at the head of a parliament considers it his business to announce it publicly, in a party's name, in a country that has spent years repeating that its future is in Brussels. The Hague does not answer that question. The voters do.