Published on: 30.08.2026 | Author: Drizan Shala
The General Belgrade Reclaimed
For thirty years, Belgrade needed Ratko Mladić to belong to another army. At his funeral, it wants its general back.
by Drizan Shala | 30 August 2026
On the evening of 28 August, Serbia's justice minister, Nenad Vujić, went on ATV and said the sentence Belgrade had prepared for the occasion. "General Mladić je general i znaju se protokoli." General Mladić is a general, and the protocols are known. The body was still in Scheveningen, held by the Mechanism while its inquiry runs, and it is there tonight. But the minister was not announcing logistics. He was announcing ownership. For thirty years, whenever responsibility for the Bosnian war crossed the Drina in Belgrade's direction, there were two armies, kept carefully apart. The Army of Republika Srpska was one. Serbia's army was the other. Mladić commanded the first, and Serbia was not to be identified with anything the first one did. That separation survived the most consequential litigation in Serbia's modern history. It has now survived everything except the coffin.
What the first army did under this man is settled wherever a court sits. Ten counts, confirmed on appeal in 2021. Genocide at Srebrenica, where the forces he commanded murdered more than eight thousand men and boys in the days after 11 July 1995 and bulldozed them into pits that investigators spent two decades reopening. A campaign of terror against the civilians of Sarajevo, forty-three months of shelling and sniper fire trained on a European capital's bread queues, tram stops and funerals, as method, not excess. Persecution and extermination across the municipalities in 1992, the emptying of eastern Bosnia that drew the map the war was fought to keep. United Nations peacekeepers taken hostage and chained to ammunition depots as insurance against air strikes. That is the biography of the rank. It attaches to the rank. And the minister has just told the world which state's register the rank sits in.
He should be aware of what the register contains, because Belgrade wrote every page of it. In January 1991 Mladić was a logistics officer in the Prishtina garrison, a colonel approaching fifty with no star in prospect. His first came on 4 October 1991, an extraordinary promotion signed one day after the four Milošević-aligned members of the SFRJ Presidency declared they could decide alone, awarded mid-campaign as his corps was operating in the Krajina. His second came on 24 April 1992, three days before the same rump proclaimed its new Yugoslavia. His third and highest, general-pukovnik, was signed in June 1994 by the president of the FRY, Zoran Lilić, verifying a decision of the Supreme Defence Council at whose table Slobodan Milošević sat and decided. Thirteen months before Srebrenica. The army he commanded never gave him a rank at all. Pale gave him a post; every star came from Belgrade.
The rank also came with a salary. In November 1993 the chief of the Yugoslav Army's General Staff, Momčilo Perišić, created the 30th Personnel Center inside that General Staff. The indictment later brought against Perišić charged that the center existed to conceal the provision and payment of officers serving across the Drina, and the records that surfaced through that case and through the Humanitarian Law Center's accounting show what it administered. Under the cover name of military post 3001, practically the entire senior command of the VRS remained on Belgrade's books, salaried, promoted and pensioned from the Serbian capital. Set the roster of that post against the tribunal's docket and the two lists merge. Tolimir, Krstić, Popović, Beara, convicted for the organization and execution of the Srebrenica killings, were Belgrade's officers. Galić, convicted for the terror against Sarajevo, was Belgrade's officer. The commander of all of it drew Belgrade's pay in the very week of the massacre. The state whose minister now says "he is a general" was not observing that July from across the Drina. It was meeting its payroll.
It went on meeting it until April 2002, seven years after Srebrenica and seven after his indictment, and when the accounts finally closed it took two states to retire one man, a decree in Banja Luka and a pension order signed in Belgrade, because no single register would hold all of him. The military pension fund, Vreme established, never determined whether it was paying an officer of the VJ or of the VRS. It paid him regardless, through the fugitive years, with word from the top of the state that a conviction for genocide would not interrupt the entitlement.
Now the courtroom version. In 2007 the International Court of Justice held that the Srebrenica genocide could not be attributed to Serbia, because the VRS was not an organ of the Serbian state. Serbia argued for that distinction with everything it had, and won, and the judgment deserves to be stated at full strength: the court weighed a state's responsibility and left criminal guilt where the tribunal had placed it, on men, not on a people, and that principle is the shield that has stood between ordinary Serbs and the collective condemnation Belgrade's officials claim the world intends for them. We are not the ones lowering that shield. Read the minister's sentence again and watch who is. The distinction between the two armies was the entire substance of Serbia's defense when the question was responsibility. Now the question is honor, and Serbia's own government is collapsing the distinction on evening television, reaching across it for the general, the rank, the flag and the protocols of the Serbian state. When liability was on the table, Mladić served another army. Now that prestige is on the table, he serves Serbia's. The economy of the arrangement is perfect, and it is not available.
A state cannot claim the general and disclaim the command. It cannot own the rank and rent out the record. If Ratko Mladić was Serbia's general, then Serbia can begin explaining why its general commanded the force that committed the genocide, why his promotion cleared Belgrade in June 1994, why his salary cleared in July 1995. If he was not Serbia's general, then the minister can explain by what authority Serbian state protocol attends the coffin of a foreign officer at all. There is no third register. The two versions of Ratko Mladić cannot both attend this funeral.
One of them is being buried too.
Because that is what Vujić's sentence actually performs. It restores Mladić to Serbia's military lineage, on the record, at the exact moment the man can no longer be tried and the state believes identification carries prestige rather than liability. Nothing about the ceremony reopens a judgment. The one finding the court did enter against Serbia, responsibility for failing over a decade to hand this man to justice, is not revisited by a state funeral; it is compounded by one. And the ceremony itself will enter the record as evidence of something no court needed to establish, the position of today's Serbia toward what was done. The funeral the minister promises will add only one thing to the file, and it is the signature. In the courtroom, Mladić belonged to somebody else. At the graveside, he will belong to Serbia. Belgrade has chosen which of those two records to certify, and every chancellery reading the burial order should note that it chose with the flag.