Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide, died on August 27 in a prison hospital in The Hague. In Belgrade the news landed mid-election-campaign — and days later residents of one city-center block woke to a new, several-meter mural of the man who commanded the Srebrenica massacre. Lela Vujanić’s essay is about that mural and everything underneath it.
What the piece lays out:
- Mladić’s arc: JNA officer from 1965, commander of the Army of Republika Srpska’s Main Staff from 1992 — the siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica genocide, war crimes across Bosnia — indicted after Dayton, living openly in Belgrade under Milošević’s protection, captured in 2011
- The state’s ambivalence: the justice minister announced a burial “with military and state honors”; only Vučić’s retreat to “family wishes” averted it
- The survivors’ verdict, from Srebrenica and across Bosnia: his death changes nothing — it does not bring back the dead or erase the mass graves
- The mythology: Mladić recast as defender of the Serbs against a new genocide, an arc from WWII slaughter through the Yugoslav wars with an anti-NATO sheen — “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” runs as graffiti on Belgrade’s main avenue
Vujanić is clear about who benefits. The myth is a “technology of staying in power”: it turns a class war lost to privatization and dispossession into an endless ethnic drama, and it rigs the two questions every Serbian contender must answer — Was there a genocide in Srebrenica? Is Kosovo Serbia? — so that myth-busters lose the parts that matter.
The essay ends on a structural note: the murals disappear only when no political force in power needs them. The wars, Vujanić writes, were a massive project of collective dispossession — and reckoning means teaching that, and directing the student movement to take some of that possession back.