Drashko Stanivukovikj, the mayor of Banja Luka, will attend Ratko Mladic's funeral and hopes the day will be declared a day of mourning. Asked whether that amounts to glorifying war crimes, he answered with a question of his own: "What kind of shameless term is that, what glorification?"

His version is that Mladic was a general who "did not choose his profession, the profession chose him in the worst of times to defend the homeland." Attending the funeral, he says, is a natural expression of respect for the fallen soldiers of the Army of Republika Srpska. He expects the day of the funeral to be declared a day of mourning across all Serb territories.

On the possible legal consequences - proceedings against him are already under way - Stanivukovikj is brief: "I don't care about that at all. What I know is the truth, and it remains the truth."

What the judgment says, and what the mayor does not

Mladic died on 27 August in the detention unit in The Hague. He was convicted of the gravest crimes committed in the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the genocide in Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed. That is not a contested interpretation - it is a final judgment of an international court.

In Stanivukovikj's entire statement, Srebrenica is not mentioned once. There is a homeland, there are fallen soldiers, there is a NATO that bombed, there is a world that was against them. There are no eight thousand names. That is not an omitted detail - it is the whole construction: take the heaviest part out of a man's biography, and all that remains is a general who defended his country.

The question is not about the man, but about the office

Stanivukovikj has a right to his opinion as a citizen. But he is not speaking as a citizen - he is speaking as the mayor of the largest city in Republika Srpska, and about declaring an official day of mourning. That is an institutional act, not private respect. The distinction is fundamental, and it is precisely that distinction which makes this more than one more statement.

The Balkans has a long practice of negotiated remembering - everyone recalls their own victims with full precision, and everyone else's through fog. Thirty years on, the mayors in the towns change, but the sentence "the whole world was against us" is passed down unchanged, like an inheritance nobody wants to open.