❓ WHAT HAPPENED: Ratko Mladic, the former Yugoslav army and Bosnian Serb paramilitary commander known as the “Butcher of Bosnia,” has died in a United Nations (UN) prison hospital in The Hague at the age of 83. He was serving a life sentence, principally for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War, in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed. The son of a communist partisan fighter and a career member of the League of Communists, Mladic previously denied being a Serbian nationalist, despite leading Serb forces against Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat forces during the war, stating in 1991, “I serve the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia with my brother officers, in order to protect all nationalities and nations.” 📰 DETAIL: Mladic was arrested in 2008 after 16 years as a fugitive and was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 by the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. His actions during the Balkan wars, particularly the siege of the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre, remain among the most-remembered episodes in the bloody civil war. Srebrenica had been designated a “safe zone” by the UN, but was stormed by Mladic after a series of attacks on Serb civilians by Bosniak forces operating from the city. He and his supporters always maintained that there was no deliberate genocide in Srebrenica, and that most of the casualties resulted from regular fighting, stressing that Bosniak women were evacuated from the town after it fell, and that subsequent killings of men and boys were carried out “behind his back.” The ICTY did not accept these arguments, however. 🎯 IMPACT: Mladic’s death closes a significant chapter in the history of the Balkans, where his actions contributed to the deaths of around 100,000 people and the displacement of over 2.5 million. 💬 KEY QUOTE: “We were a happy country with happy peoples, and we had a good life until Muslims began listening to what [European leaders] and the Western mafia were telling them.” – Mladic defending the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1995 👀 FLASHBACK: The Balkan wars erupted as communist Yugoslavia’s constituent socialist republics—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia— began to break apart along ethnic lines in the early ’90s, with Serb-majority areas of Bosnia and Croatia attempting to break away from the newly independent states in turn. Mladic was a prominent Bosnian Serb commander during the civil war in Bosnia, in which Bosnian Muslims and Christian Serbs were both targeted. Defending his actions during an appeal hearing in 2020, Mladic stated, “Fate put me in a position to defend my country, the SFRY [Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia], that you Western powers had devastated with the help of the Vatican and the Western mafia, [then-U.S. President George H.W.] Bush and [then-German Foreign Minister Klaus] Kinkel.” | 
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