GENERAL RATKO MLADIĆ DIES: Former VRS Commander Loses Battle with Serious Illness at the Age of 84!

Former commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS) Ratko Mladić died today.

The news of the general’s death was confirmed by his family to Euronews Serbia.

Mladić, Chief of the General Staff of the VRS, was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in November 2017, after being found guilty of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide and other war crimes committed between 1992 and 1995, including attacks on civilians in Sarajevo, terror, killings, inhumane treatment during the expulsion of civilians from Srebrenica, and the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The indictment also states that more than seven thousand boys and men, Bosnian Muslims, were killed in Srebrenica.

Mladić was indicted in 1995 and had been on the run since the end of 1996, although news agencies reported that he was seen in public in Serbia until the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s regime.

After that, all trace of him was lost until May 25, 2011, when he was arrested in the village of Lazarevo near Zrenjanin, in the house of one of his relatives. He was extradited to the Tribunal five days later.

His family requested in 2010 that Mladić be declared dead, but the Court rejected the request.

According to BIRN, the chief prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal described Mladić as “a very, very dangerous man” and said that her goal was to ensure that he was held accountable for the first genocide committed on European soil after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

As Deutsche Welle reported, Western journalists attributed the following statement to Mladić: “Borders are always drawn in blood, the foundations of every state rest on graves.”

During the search for him, there was speculation that he was hiding in various military facilities and barracks, and that he had been seen in Belgrade and other locations. In February 2006, news even broke that he had been found and arrested, but this was soon denied by the Serbian government.

Mladić was born on March 12, 1942, in the village of Božinovići, in the municipality of Kalinovik (Bosnia and Herzegovina). He graduated from the Military Academy in Belgrade.

He was appointed commander of the Main Staff of the Army of the Republika Srpska in 1992 and remained in that position until 1996, when he was dismissed by the then President of Republika Srpska Biljana Plavšić under pressure from the Hague Tribunal and the international community.

He was awarded the rank of colonel general in 1994.

From his marriage to his wife Bosa, he had a son, Darko. He also had a daughter, Ana, who died by suicide in 1994.