Ratko Mladic Dies at 84 in UN Custody at The Hague

Ratko Mladic died at 84 in a United Nations prison hospital in The Hague, leaving the Srebrenica genocide he commanded without the reckoning survivors wanted.

A UN tribunal convicted him in 2017 of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and appeal judges upheld the life sentence in 2021.

His forces besieged Sarajevo, where more than 10,000 people died, and killed over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.

He spent 16 years on the run before Serbian police found him in a rural farmhouse in 2011, and he never recognized the court that tried him.

Judges refused his release in May, ruling that his care in detention was comprehensive despite a stroke that had left him barely able to speak.

Hasan Hasanovic, who lost his twin brother and father at Srebrenica, said the death brings no closure because it ends neither the denial nor the divided country the killing produced.

The tribunal outlived the man but not the argument. Mladic died still refusing to recognize the court, and Bosnian Serb leaders mourned him as a defender rather than a convict, which is the condition survivors keep naming. NPR counts more than 100,000 dead and a million driven from their homes across the war he helped run. Al Jazeera reports that judge Graciela Gatti Santana has ordered a full inquiry into the circumstances of the death. That inquiry reports next, and it is the last official document his case will generate.