Extreme Nationalist Serbia and Ethnic Serbs Treat a War Criminal as a Hero

    Ratko Mladic, the ethnic Serb general known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” responsible for the policy of “ethnic cleansing,” for which he was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, died in prison last week.  The concerns I have posted about Serbian nationalism were validated by the treatment by him by ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and other States that became independent from Yugoslavia and by Serbia as a national hero. Serbia gave the war criminal a state funeral, ethnic Serbs outside Serbia praised him, and many thousands of Serbs paid respects to Mladic at his funeral. 

    Serbia, the dominant republic within the former Yugoslavia, was responsible for the bloody wars that resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia into each of its parts.  Serbia, which is Slavic and Orthodox, was led by a Communist dictator who fomented Serbian nationalism and hatred toward other ethnicities and religions to try to remain in power after the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1991, which caused independence movements across Yugoslavia to break away from Belgrade's dominance.  Serbia fomented ethnic Serb minorities in the other parts of Yugoslavia, such as in Bosnia, where Bosnian Serb leaders, through Mladic, attacked ethnic Croats, who are Slavic and Catholic, and Bosniaks, who are Slavic and Muslim, in a bloody civil war from 1992 to 1995.  Mladic was arrested in 2011, convicted in 2017 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and sentenced to life imprisonment.  Bosnia is divided into two main entities, one Serb and the other Croat and Bosniak.  

    Serbia, which has historically been friendly with Russia, continues to encourage ethnic divisions in Bosnia and Kosovo, where Albanians are the majority and Serbs a minority.  Serbia should not be allowed to join the European Union until it rejects extreme nationalism, accepts responsibility for its crimes, and clearly opposes Russian aggression and imperialism.