Mladic’s funeral: Were no lessons learned?
Thirty years of international justice has taught political leaders little.
Today, thousands gathered in the Serbian capital Belgrade to pay their respects to Ratko Mladic, the head of the Bosnian Serb army, who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Anyone glorifying Mladic is approving mass murder of thousands of innocent people. What should we then make of the Serbian state that organised a funeral with state honours for him? Or of the Serbs from Serbia proper and the Bosnian Serbs who attended it?
Does the glorification, I have been asked, reflect the limits of international justice by showing that international law has failed to stop wars and whatever else can stick with the criminality of war?
I first visited Yugoslavia as a schoolboy on a student exchange in 1963 and stayed – without knowing at the time – with a Serb family where the father worked for Aleksandar Rankovic, a famous Serb and communist politician considered to be the third most powerful man in Yugoslavia after President Josip Broz Tito.