Ratko Mladić, the former Bosnian Serb military commander convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the Bosnian War, died Thursday in a hospital in The Hague, Netherlands, while serving a life sentence. He was 84.
A U.N. tribunal convicted Mladic in 2017 for orchestrating the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, and for his role in the years-long siege of Sarajevo during the 1992-95 war. He evaded arrest for 16 years before being captured near Belgrade in May 2011 and extradited to face trial.
Reaction in the region remained divided. Munira Subasic of the Mothers of Srebrenica, whose son was among those killed, said a major war criminal had died, while also noting that many Bosnian Serbs still deny the scale of the atrocities he commanded. In Pale, the wartime seat of Bosnian Serb power, some residents mourned him as a wartime leader.
Mladic’s death closes one of the last major cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which spent more than two decades prosecuting crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.
