‘The butcher may be gone, but to many he is a hero’: victims condemn glorification of Mladić

Architect of Srebrenica genocide is dead but those scarred by his atrocities say his ideology is still shockingly pervasive T o most of the world, he was and will always be the “Butcher of Bosnia”, a grim epithet but one that still fails to fully convey the evil and horror inflicted on its people by Gen Ratko Mladić, who died in prison on Thursday . As commander of the Bosnian Serb forces, Mladić was responsible for the killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women and children during the savage breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. He was most notoriously the architect of ethnic cleansing and the genocide at Srebrenica in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. Today, 31 years after the Dayton agreement ended the Bosnian conflict and the 1,425-day siege of Sarajevo – the longest in modern warfare – Mladić is dead, but his legacy still divides the Balkans. Everyone knew him and his name.

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