By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost
Ratko Mladić died in prison on Thursday at 84, and for a moment, the reckoning some victims waited three decades for felt complete. It isn't. According to the Guardian, survivors of the atrocities he ordered say the man is gone but his admirers are not.
As commander of Bosnian Serb forces during the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, Mladić was held responsible for the killing of an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children, the Guardian reported. He was the architect of the Srebrenica massacre, in which at least 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered — the worst massacre on European soil since the Second World War.
The world called him the Butcher of Bosnia. A conviction and a life sentence followed, eventually, from an international tribunal. But the Guardian's reporting from Bosnia this week found something harder to prosecute: an ideology of ethnic cleansing that survivors say remains "shockingly pervasive" in some quarters, where Mladić is still spoken of with reverence rather than revulsion.
That gap — between what international justice declared and what some communities still believe — is the real story here. A war criminal's death closes one chapter. It does not, victims say, close the argument over what happened, or why, or who was right.
We note plainly: this account relies on the Guardian's reporting from Bosnia; the American Times has not independently verified quotes from named victims.
FILED FROM SOMEWHERE WITH BAD COFFEE —
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."