Ratko Mladić has croaked

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On August 27, at the age of 84, following a series of strokes, this “super butcher” from Bosnia—who was serving a life sentence handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (a United Nations institution based in The Hague responsible for trying war crimes committed in Yugoslavia)—passed away.

Mladić was commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb Army during the Yugoslav Wars, which took place from 1991 to 1999, during which the various constituent republics of Tito’s Yugoslavia gained independence; Between 1992 and 1994, Bosnia and Herzegovina was the scene of a devastating war during which the Srebrenica genocide took place, where approximately 10,000 Bosnian Muslims (men, women, and children) were mercilessly massacred in an ethnic cleansing operation long planned by Serbian nationalists. Thirty years later, the Corriere della Sera recalled this extermination carried out under the watchful eyes of UN peacekeepers tasked with protecting the Muslim population (1) ; at that time, Bosnia was home to more than one million Bosnian Serbs, most of whom appeared to want to remain part of Serbia. Amid the chaos of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, and in the face of Euro-American influence that supported the independence of the various former Yugoslav republics as a means of countering Russia, Bosnian Serb nationalists found in Slobodan Milošević the Serbian president who intended to eliminate the Muslims in order to divide Bosnia with Croatia, led by Franjo Tudman, in Radovan Karadžić the ideologue of Bosnian Serb nationalist extremism, and in Ratko Mladić the military commander ready to organize an army of butchers to purge the territory inhabited by Bosnian Serbs of all Bosniaks and Muslims. And, while Croatia was establishing itself as an independent state, a civil war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina, pitting the Croats against both the Serbs and the Bosniaks, the Serbs against both the Croats and the Bosniaks, with the latter finding themselves caught in the crossfire; on the Serbian side, the Republika Srpska was formed, turning toward Moscow while clearly distancing itself from the West; at the same time, the Croatian Krajina was driving out the Serbian minority from the territory where it had lived for centuries. Against the backdrop of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the territories—particularly those of Bosnia and Herzegovina and southern Croatia—where different ethnic groups coexisted and vied for control of the countryside, a village, a river, or access to the sea, served as the stage where wars between them were always on the verge of breaking out. During those years, particularly between 1992 and 1995, the massacres—including the genocide at Srebrenica—were not so much a series of events confined to those territories and attributable to the barbarity of the Slavic populations (as has often been claimed), but rather a stage on which the European imperialist powers—with Russia and the United States pulling the strings behind the scenes—had been fanning the flames for years with the aim of disintegrating Yugoslavia and seizing, at any cost, the economic territories where they could establish their dominance. These imperialist interests were masked by propaganda that bandied about terms such as liberal democracy, the free self-determination of peoples, the free development of trade and the labor market, political independence, and so on, whereas in reality, the aim was to wrest as much territory as possible from the former Yugoslavia and remove it from the influence of Russian imperialism, even at the cost of massacres and genocidal atrocities—against which the champions of the great World War massacres allowed themselves the luxury of organizing “war crimes” trials (of the “Nuremberg” type) against the Mladićs, Karadžić, and Milošević—even though they had turned a blind eye to their own barbaric acts.

The decision by the current Serbian government to honor General Ratko Mladić with a state funeral has caused quite a stir, thereby bestowing upon him the highest honor a state can bestow upon one of its deceased representatives. But there is nothing surprising about this. Throughout history, every ruling class has bestowed the highest honors on those who have acted—even in the most barbaric and violent ways—to defend “the fatherland,” to defend national honor, and to protect the specific interests of the nation. These same authorities, these same high-ranking representatives of governments and states who accused the Serbian government of glorifying Ratko Mladić—yet whom no one ever thought to arrest, neither during the siege of Sarajevo nor during the Srebrenica massacre—are the very same ones who turn a blind eye to, or even support and justify, a Netanyahu who has been exterminating the Palestinian population for years. There are the masterminds, and there are the hired killers, the perpetrators: it could not be clearer that the hitmen, the foot soldiers, are the ones who, sooner or later, risk paying personally for the crimes committed, just as it is crystal clear that the masterminds—generally well-hidden and protected—never pay for these crimes, but are the ones who then take credit for having prosecuted and imprisoned the hired killers who “got their hands dirty.” One dead Mladić will give rise to another, and then yet another, because the masterminds are always the same: the bourgeois and imperialist politicians who operate behind the scenes, always ready to exploit their adversaries’ weaknesses, always ready to eliminate obstacles to their business and interests—obstacles that may be laws, institutions, companies, borders, individuals, or entire peoples.

(1) See https://www.msn.com/it/crimine/generale/srebrenica-storia-di-una-strage-10mila-morti-in-8-giorni-mladic-fece-stuprare-le-bimbe-bosniache-prima-di-sgozzarle/ar-AA2b5dMw

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