Serbian Justice Minister Nenad Vujić said that convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić will be buried with the highest state honors and that Serbia will ensure the transport of his remains from The Hague.
“We expect that the Hague Mechanism will provide a specific timeframe, what the procedures are and what steps need to be taken. If they say we come tomorrow morning, we are ready to be in The Hague and take over Mladić’s body,” Vujić said, according to Serbian media.
Hague convict and former commander of the Bosnian Serb army Ratko Mladić died on Thursday in The Hague at the age of 84.
Mladić, who was convicted by the Hague Tribunal (ICTY) for genocide in Srebrenica and other crimes during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s, had been in a detention hospital since 2024 due to serious health conditions.
Under Mladić’s command, the Republika Srpska army committed numerous war crimes. The central events during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which Mladić was sentenced to life imprisonment for personal and command responsibility by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on 22 November 2017, were the siege of Sarajevo from May 1992 to August 1995, in which more than 12,000 civilians died, and the genocide in Srebrenica in which Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniaks.
His lawyers have repeatedly requested early release due to his poor health. The request was most recently submitted on 18 August, but was rejected by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague, which succeeded the ICTY.
