First, the Serbian Minister of Justice, Nenad Vujić, stated that Ratko Mladić should have a state funeral, granting the war criminal full public honours; then, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić claimed that the Mladić family’s wishes ought to be respected. In the end, the resulting arrangement recalled Vučić’s traditional fence-sitting posture: no official state tributes, yet a funeral rite presided over by Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Porfirije – who is closely aligned with the regime – and attended by numerous public figures, including six Serbian ministers and the political leadership of Republika Srpska. Top political figures and high-level Serbian nationalists preferred instead to send their sons, including those of President Vučić, Interior Minister Ivica Dačić, and convicted war criminal Vojislav Šešelj.
As chance would have it, the visit of the President of Uzbekistan, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, on that very day provided Aleksandar Vučić with a convenient pretext for his absence. In fact, Mladić’s funeral stretched the president’s oscillatory posture to its breaking point: on the one hand, the imperative to satisfy those nationalist hardliners who remain an essential pillar of his electoral base; on the other, the need to subtly mitigate backlash from Brussels, where a scheduled visit to Serbia by Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos had been postponed following the initial announcement of a state funeral.
The main mask of Serbian nationalism is purely political. Aleksandar Vučić’s political ascension is rooted in the glorification of Ratko Mladić. “We will kill 100 Muslims for each killed Serb,” is one his most infamous statements. It was delivered in the Serbian parliament on July 20, 1995, in the exact days Mladić’s troops were committing the Srebrenica genocide. The former aspiring journalist who reported for Serbian television from the Sarajevo hills – from where Mladić ordered his artillery to strike Muslim-inhabited neighbourhoods “until they go mad” – continued to praise Mladić long after the war ended. In 2007, while his Serbian Radical Party was in opposition, he staged one of his most infamous political performances in New Belgrade, symbolically renaming a boulevard named after Zoran Đinđić, the assassinated pro-democratic Prime Minister, after Ratko Mladić.
Later, when a supposed transformation from radical to progressive, from nationalist to pro-European, became necessary to assume power and promise peace and stability to Serbia and the region, he appeared to dismiss these habits. However, a newly pragmatic Vučić could hardly afford to lose the electoral support of the radicals who had followed him since he was seen weeping when Šešelj departed for the Hague Tribunal to face war crimes charges.
Since then, support for Mladić and his crimes has become indirect, largely outsourced to football hooligans and nationalist organizations, albeit with official complicity. In recent years, this support has also manifested in hundreds of murals depicting the war criminal across the country. This situation reached its peak in 2021, when Mladić’s life sentence became final and a massive mural portraying his face was painted in downtown Belgrade. The painting remained under round-the-clock protection by masked thugs and plainclothes officers against anti-nationalist activists who repeatedly defaced it. In fact, many of these thugs turned out to be members of extremist organizations linked to the regime, while police connivance was such that the only arrests made were of two activists who threw eggs at the mural.
This soap opera worked effectively for the domestic political audience. However, Serbian nationalism had its international moments as well.
One of the latest occurred in May 2024, when the UN assembly approved a resolution declaring July 11 as the “Srebrenica Genocide Remembrance Day.” Vučić was then seen draped in a Serbian flag, weeping as the resolution was adopted.
The establishment of the Srebrenica Genocide Remembrance Day revitalized a persistent mantra of Serbian nationalism: the claim that court sentences for genocide are directed at the Serbian people as a whole. “The purpose and intent of the resolution is to impose moral and political guilt on one side, on one people – that of Serbia and Republika Srpska,” declared the Serbian President after the UN vote. Although the text of the resolution makes no such claim, and no international court or judge has ever scapegoated the Serbian people, the regime desperately requires this reading of events. It does so for at least two reasons. First, because it resurrects the 1990s nationalist narrative framing Serbs as the primary victims of the conflict, thereby allowing any verdict condemning individual perpetrators or any resolution honouring the victims to be wilfully misconstrued. Second, because divided and manipulated collective memories have become central to national identity. In this specific context, the Serbian narrative surrounding Srebrenica serves a clear anti-Western political function.
Thus, the only figures insisting that Serbs are a “genocidal people” are Serbian political leaders themselves. By allowing a mass funeral attended by high-ranking political figures from both Republika Srpska and Serbia, are Banja Luka and Belgrade distancing themselves from the criminal actions of an individual, or are they endorsing them? How can public tributes to a man convicted of genocide and war crimes – and locally hailed as a “hero” – convince the world that Serbian officials are not nationalizing his actions into a collective, yet highly selective, memory?
Any remaining shadow of doubt was dispelled by Red Star Belgrade supporters, who have frequently aligned themselves with the Serbian government. Through a fateful convergence of timing, the Belgrade football derby took place on the eve of Mladić’s funeral, providing a platform for some of Serbia’s most violent fringes to gather in unison and throw their full weight behind this national-populist reclamation of Mladić's crimes. At the start of the match, Red Star supporters unveiled a massive choreographic display inspired by the moment Mladić’s troops entered Srebrenica and the former general ordered his forces “straight to Potočari” – the village where thousands of civilians had sought refuge and where the massacres began. If these are the aspects of Mladić most publicly glorified – to the point of uniting the otherwise bitter rivals of Red Star and Partizan in chant – who is truly responsible for equating the crimes committed by Serb forces with the Serbian people? The Hague Tribunal, the UN resolution, or the propaganda that has indoctrinated generations for decades?
The entire fanfare surrounding Mladić's death and funeral represents a lost opportunity for Serbia, but a major victory for its nationalism. Yet, it also exposes the profound incoherence of nationalism itself. Years of propaganda have produced distorted interpretations of the events in Srebrenica, illustrating the tenth stage of genocide: denial. However, Serbian propaganda has escalated to an eleventh stage – what genocide scholar Hariz Halilović terms “triumphalism.”
Here lies the fundamental contradiction: either Serbian nationalism is glorifying an event that – according to its own narrative – never occurred, or it is denying what its propaganda has relentlessly incited since the 1990s: namely, the ethnic cleansing of Muslim populations.
Such inconsistency actively undermines the regional reconciliation process while reinforcing selective memory. The contradiction is so stark that Serbia can hardly protest the potential acquittal of the former Kosovo Liberation Army Commander Hashim Thaçi; similarly, Serbian officials face a moral paradox when protesting nationalist glorification elsewhere, whether it be the celebration of “the liberation of Knin” in Croatia or Kosovo’s independence festivities.
In conclusion, Serbian nationalism has managed to complete a self-fulfilling prophecy. By celebrating Mladić on a national scale and employing or condoning rhetoric that frames him as a “national hero,” ethno-nationalist elites are doing nothing less than nationalizing the blame, effectively asserting: “We are Mladić.” After years of constructing the false premise that international law and the UN aim to condemn the entire Serbian people as genocidal, the Serbian regime has succeeded in making that premise a reality. It has done so entirely on its own, for its sole political benefit, and to the absolute detriment of the regional reconciliation process.