Ratko Mladic, a war criminal convicted for his role in orchestrating the Srebrenica Genocide in 1995 – the first genocide on European soil since the second world war – died in prison in The Hague at the age of 84. He had been serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity – crimes whose “seriousness” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres restated after his death on Thursday. On Friday, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic accused the UN war crimes court of “uncivilised behaviour” for not allowing Mladic early release, which would have seen him die in Serbia. Earlier this year, Belgrade requested he be allowed to receive medical treatment outside prison, saying his health condition was “serious”.
Known as the “Butcher of Bosnia”, Mladic was one of the most notorious military commanders of the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. Under his command, Bosnian Serb forces seized Srebrenica, near the Serbian border, in July 1995, despite the UN declaring the municipality a “safe area”. In the following days, the forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys.
Here is a timeline of the major events of Mladic’s life, leading up to his death in detention this week: Ratko Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, was born in March 1942 in the village of Bozanovici in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina). His father was a member of a communist-led resistance to the Axis powers in World War II. In 1966, Mladic married Bosiljka Jedic and later had two children, Darko and Ana.
At the age of 22, Mladic joined the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and moved up the ranks. By 1991, he was the head of the Operational Teaching Department of the 9th Corps in Knin (today’s Croatia) and later commanded the Headquarters of the 9th Corps Maritime Division. The Presidency of the Social Federative Republic of Yugoslavia promoted Mladic to the rank of major-general in 1991 and lieutenant–colonel general in April 1992.
He commanded the headquarters of the JNA’s Second Military Area Command in Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serb army, led by Mladic, laid siege to the capital city of Sarajevo. The longest military siege of a capital city in modern history, it lasted 1,460 days, killing more than 11,500 people.
An estimated 480,000 to 500,000 missiles were fired on the city. In July 1995, Mladic’s troops captured Srebrenica and Zepa, enclaves under the protection of the United Nations. In what was later termed a genocide, 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed, and between 25,000 and 30,000 were expelled from the area.
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