Ratko Mladic, Murderous ‘Butcher of Bosnia,’ Dies at 83
New York Times · LC · trust 60/100
A general during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he was convicted in the killing of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II.
Share full article Ratko Mladic in Sarajevo in 1994. He was captured in 2011 and put on trial for genocide and war crimes. Credit... Pascal Guyot/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images By Dan Bilefsky
His death was announced on Thursday by Serbian state media. The authorities at The Hague said he died while hospitalized there, but did not provide a specific cause of death.
Mr. Mladic was captured on May 26, 2011, in a farming village north of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, after almost 16 years as a fugitive, ending one of the longest manhunts in modern history. His 2017 conviction by an international tribunal on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes marked the end of a dark and bloody chapter.
In pronouncing a life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie , said Mr. Mladic’s crimes ranked “among the most heinous known to humankind.” Mr. Mladic appealed the verdict, which was upheld in 2021.
The Balkan wars erupted as Yugoslavia was breaking up into independent states. Slobodan Milosevic , the nationalist president of Serbia, one of those states, was intent on creating a Greater Serbia. He reawakened old ethnic and religious enmities and started wars pitting Serbs against Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians of Kosovo.
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