Ratko Mladic, known as the “Butcher of Bosnia” for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, died in UN custody at the age of 84.
Bosnian Serb army Commander General Ratko Mladic wears head-phones while travelling in helicopter near the eastern Bosnian town of Zepa Jul 29, 1995. (Photo: REUTERS)
28 Aug 2026 12:22AM
BELGRADE: Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide for orchestrating the 1995 massacre of at least 8,000 Muslims in a UN-designated "safe area" of Bosnia, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two, died on Thursday (Aug 27) in UN custody.The slaughter in Srebrenica was the grisly culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machineguns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000.The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was "ethnic cleansing" - the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.
