A minister's party glorifies genocide convict Ratko Mladic, and from VMRO-DPMNE - nothing

The party of a minister in Macedonia's government published a text glorifying Ratko Mladic. The Democratic Party of Serbs in Macedonia, whose leader Ivan Stoilkovic is the minister of local self-government, described Mladic on its Facebook page as "a soldier, a general and a man who devoted his life to the service of the army and the people he belonged to".

Ratko Mladic is serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among them is Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 men and boys were killed. That is not a contested historical interpretation - it is a final court judgment.

According to the post, the text was written by Tatjana Domazet, described as a librarian at the National Library of Serbia in Belgrade. On top of that, Dalibor Kitanovic, director of the Agency for the Realisation of the Rights of Communities, published an AI-generated image showing Mladic alongside Serbian historical figures under the title "Generals of the heavenly army".

The reactions and the silence

SDSM responded that for Stoilkovic "the leader of the Bosnian Serbs Ratko Mladic - convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity - is a great man and a hero", placing it in the wider context of a pro-Russian agenda inside the government. They asked Mickoski to say whether this is the government's position.

From DUI the message was different in tone, identical in substance: "They are not talking about history. They are romanticising a person convicted of some of the gravest crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War." Vlen condemned the glorification, but its statement pointed at the head of the agency - not at Stoilkovic's party.

From VMRO-DPMNE - nothing.

The question left open

Stoilkovic is not an anonymous party official. He is a minister in this government, and his party is part of the ruling coalition. When the party of a minister publicly pays tribute to a convicted war criminal, the question "is that the government's position" is not party rhetoric - it is a question the prime minister is obliged to answer.

Silence is also an answer; it just takes longer to work out which one.

Macedonia is not Bosnia and has no Srebrenica of its own. But the Balkans know this scene by heart: the verdict is there, the documents are there, the graves are there - and still, every few years, somebody tries to put the man back in uniform and pull him out of the courtroom. The difference this time is that it is not a fringe page doing it, but the page of a party holding a ministerial seat.