Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb former general nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, died on Thursday in the United Nations Detention Unit in The Hague. He was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017 for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Serbia’s Minister of Justice, Nenad Vujić, has announced that he will be given a state funeral - sparking a major controversy. Normalising the abnormalJOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Why does Aleksandar Vučić cast Ratko Mladić as a hero? In order to whitewash his own wartime and political record, Vreme notes: “Mladić could always count on the radicals and their followers, who openly supported him. In rehabilitating him, they also rehabilitated their own political careers. Both sides needed the myth of the heroic general. And it worked: they controlled 90 percent of the media, and were able to normalise the abnormal. And in the process they destroyed political and public life. It will take a long time to recover from this. One of the tasks will be to relegate Mladić to his rightful place in history.” Filip Švarm Original articleShare on Conspiracy theories and victimhood Večernji list criticises the way Mladić and the war is portrayed in Serbia: “‘There were victims on both sides’ is all one can get out of Aleksandar Vučić, but not without him turning the whole story on its head and calling the verdict an injustice against the Serbs, about whose bloodshed and sacrifices in his view nobody cares. He makes untenable comparisons between Croatian General Ante Gotovina, who was acquitted, and Ratko Mladić, who was convicted, to imply that the tribunal in The Hague is driven by a global conspiracy against Serbia. Apparently it’s more important to preserve national myths of victimhood and instil them in new generations than to follow the European path.”