{"id":873536,"date":"2026-08-27T16:54:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873536\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T16:54:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T16:54:12","slug":"ratko-mladic-bosnian-serb-general-dubbed-the-butcher-of-bosnia-dies-aged-84","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/873536\/","title":{"rendered":"Ratko Mladi\u0107, Bosnian-Serb general dubbed, the \u2018Butcher of Bosnia,\u2019 dies aged 84"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Ratko Mladi\u0107, the Bosnian-Serb general who orchestrated the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan wars, has died in prison aged 84.\n <\/p>\n

\n Known as the \u201cButcher of Bosnia,\u201d Mladi\u0107 was convicted in 2017<\/a> by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for masterminding a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Bosnia\u2019s non-Serb population in the early 1990s.\n <\/p>\n

\n The UN-established court found him guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, persecution, extermination, murder, terror, unlawful attacks on civilians and hostage-taking.\n <\/p>\n

\n At the time of Mladi\u0107\u2019s indictment, ICTY Judge Fouad Riad described the actions the former general oversaw as \u201cunimaginable savagery.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Mladi\u0107 died while serving a life sentence at the UN Detention Unit in The Hague, his lawyer Dragan Iveti\u0107 told CNN. He spent just over 15 years in prison.\n <\/p>\n

\n Following his conviction, Mladi\u0107 made multiple appeals and requests for release on medical grounds. The last of these was filed by his lawyers just last week.\n <\/p>\n

\n They asked for an early release on humanitarian grounds, quoting the detention unit\u2019s doctors as saying that his \u201coverall condition has rapidly declined\u201d and warning that his death \u201cmay occur at any time.\u201d The request was denied.\n <\/p>\n

\n Mladi\u0107 was born on March 12, 1942, in the municipality of Kalinovik in what was then Yugoslavia. Born at the height of World War II, his early life was deeply affected by the conflict \u2013 his father Nedja Mladi\u0107 was killed by the Ustasha regime<\/a>, a Croatian fascist movement which was installed by the Nazis and Fascist Italy in occupied Yugoslavia, and which perpetrated genocide against Jews, Serbs and Roma.\n <\/p>\n

\n Ratko Mladi\u0107 trained at the military academy of the Yugoslav People\u2019s Army in Belgrade. He graduated in 1965, joined the Communist Party and became a career soldier.\n <\/p>\n

\"Mladic<\/p>\n

\n After the breakup of Yugoslavia, Mladi\u0107 became the Commander of the General Staff of the Army of the breakaway Serb Republic in Bosnia, which was backed and armed by the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.\n <\/p>\n

\n As the army chief, Mladi\u0107 was the main architect of a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, directly overseeing widespread and indiscriminate killing, deportations and forcible transfers of civilians.\n <\/p>\n

\n While Mladi\u0107 was found guilty of a number of atrocities, two of his crimes have become synonymous with the terror he inflicted on the Muslim and Croat population of Bosnia during the war: the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre.\n <\/p>\n

\n Under his command, Bosnian Serb forces besieged the city of Sarajevo from higher ground in 1992. They trapped its residents in the valley below for two years, conducting frequent shelling and sniper attacks against the civilian population. More than 10,000 people, including many children, died during the siege.\n <\/p>\n

\n In July 1995, Mladi\u0107 spearheaded an attack on the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, which was designated a \u201csafe place\u201d by the UN. The massacre remains Europe\u2019s worst atrocity since World War II: More than 7,000 Muslims, mostly men and boys were slaughtered within a few days.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n Riad described the events that took place in Srebrenica as \u201ctruly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers\u2019 eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson,\u201d the judge said as Mladic\u2019s indictment was announced.\n <\/p>\n

\n While Mladic was indicted by the ICTY in November 1995, he managed to evade justice for 16 long years.\n <\/p>\n

\n He first took refuge in Belgrade, living under Milosevic\u2019s protection. When the former Serbian president was arrested in 2001, Mladi\u0107 went into hiding, eluding authorities for another decade.\n <\/p>\n

\n He was finally captured in Serbia in May 2011 and was extradited to the Hague shortly after that. His trial lasted more than four years and was, in many ways, the culmination of the work of the ICTY. It was the tribunal\u2019s last major case, and it included harrowing testimonies from hundreds of witnesses.\n <\/p>\n

\n Mladic showed little remorse during the proceedings and denied any responsibility. He blamed the actions he was being tried for on subordinates who executed his orders.\n <\/p>\n

\n In his closing argument, ICTY prosecutor Alan Tieger had described Mladi\u0107 as \u201cthe master of life and death.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe time has come for General Mladic to be held accountable for those crimes against each of his victims and the communities he destroyed,\u201d Tieger said. \u201cNo one can fathom the extent of the sufferings for which Ratko Mladic is responsible.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n This story has been updated.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ratko Mladi\u0107, the Bosnian-Serb general who orchestrated the Srebrenica massacre and the siege of Sarajevo during the Balkan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":873537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-873536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/873537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}