Ratko Mladić is dead. Europe’s genocidal logic lives on

Ratko Mladić, convicted of genocide, was buried by a state with full honours. On 7 September in Belgrade, his coffin was wrapped in the flags of both Serbia and Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The genocidaire’s remains had been flown from The Hague on a government plane, and a military commemoration in his honour had been held at an army venue two days earlier.

Soldiers carried the coffin, with an officer’s cap and a sabre placed on top, to a funeral service led by the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, attended by several thousand, including top officials of Republika Srpska who stood alongside the Russian ambassador.

Aleksandar Vučić, the president of Serbia, was not in attendance. Vučić described the funeral as an “emotional outpouring”, and said it had “nothing to do” with the government approving the event. The honours were military rather than formally state honours, and he made it clear that the state was merely respecting a family’s wishes and providing a dignified burial.

The responsibility of organising the funeral belonged, supposedly, to a grieving public and a private family, despite the aircraft being state-commissioned, as well as the soldiers in attendance, and of course the honours.

Genocidal logic

Anyone who has lived with the enduring ravages of the Bosnian genocide is familiar with this kind of behaviour by the state: the deed is done and simultaneously declared not to have been done, or not to have been done by anyone in particular.

Vučić’s comments and Mladić’s funeral form part of an architecture that I call a genocidal logic. By this I mean it is something far more widespread and pervasive than a set of ideas held by unpleasant men, it’s a structure that organises our world. It organises a politics in which the lives of some are considered targetable for persecution, and it works, subsequently, to control the record of what was done to those who were targeted.

Its instrument is the sowing of doubt and silencing as “every side was guilty”, and it drags with it a silent majority that becomes slightly more visible during events such as the genocidal general’s funeral. The numbers are contested, the historians disagree, and, after all, “nobody can really know”.

This claim, of course, has limits. Contested facts are the ordinary condition of politics, and politics can be cruel and exclusionary without meeting this description. The same institutions that carried out the attempted annihilation manufacture doubt.

The murders, the genocidal rape, the abuse, the destruction, and the forced exile culminate in a destabilising of the facts that establish that these things happened. The negating that accompanies all of this leaves those who survived the violence to reassess what was “real” in the lives and relationships they had before, and has muddied their relationships ever since.

Material for negation

Mladić spent his last years in a cell, partly because the doubt he sowed through his negationism failed him. An International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) courtroom convicted him of genocide for Srebrenica on 11 July 1995, while acquitting him on the count alleging genocide across six municipalities in 1992.

Višegrad, the town in Eastern Bosnia my family fled, was not even among these six. The law drew a line through a continuous project of eradication, named one part of it genocide, and left the rest with “ethnic cleansing”. That judgement has supplied material for negation and obfuscation ever since, and Serbia and Republika Srpska have been living in the space it opened.

My father was on a planned kill list drawn up for the “non-Serb” men of towns and villages in (eastern) Bosnia, most of them Muslim, in the early 1990s. He was pulled out of the car at a checkpoint while we were fleeing. He survived by God’s will, and I say that having engaged with academic explanations available for how a person does or does not survive such a list.

Relatives and friends who had already escaped were told they would be safe if they came home. Some believed it; some of them were subsequently murdered, and some raped. But how many mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, sisters, and brothers across how many decades and centuries and how many places have been on such enacted lists, and how many were reassured all was fine before the orders were carried out?

So forgive me, or not, for having no tolerance in a politics of appeasement towards fascistic dehumanisers, wherever their racist, anti-Muslim, antisemitic, transphobic and patriarchal exclusions are practised, and whoever is currently supplying their logic.

Having studied the intimate reverberations of mass violence, people’s searches for healing, and perpetrator logics for a living, I am all too familiar with the complexities of the arguments intimately, inside out and outside in.

Fuel for the far-right

The route from Serb Nationalist genocidality into Anders Breivik’s manifesto, and into the song Brenton Tarrant played on his way to the Christchurch mosques, has again been re-traced recently, allowing me the blessing of not having to repeat their words. I would add only what follows. Bosnia was not an analogy for these mass murderers; it was part of their working model, the proof that a European Muslim population could be destroyed, while the rest of the continent was busy elsewhere.

The parliamentary version speaks in slightly more cautious wording when it repeats these same statements, though it is becoming more careless. On 6 September, the day before Mladić’s burial in Belgrade, the AfD took 43.8% of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt, on a record turnout of 77%. It fell three seats short of forming the first single-party majority far-right state government in Germany since the Nazi era.

The AfD’s branch there is classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by Germany’s domestic intelligence service, while in May 2025, the federal AfD branch was deemed to hold racist and anti-Muslim positions which were incompatible with the constitutional order. The party sits as the second largest in the Bundestag despite a court suspending the racist and anti-Muslim designation in February 2016 pending the party’s challenge.

Viktor Orbán told Brussels a decade ago that Hungary had “a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country,” and has since said that Hungarians “do not want to become a mixed race”. Six years after Brussels, he was more specific. Asked about Bosnia’s application to join the EU, he said, “The challenge with Bosnia is how to integrate a country with 2 million Muslims,” and that managing the security of such a state mattered to everyone else's security too.

In Northern Belgium, where I work at a university, the separatist Flemish Vlaams Belang was offering one-way plane tickets to Muslims who “yearn for the Islamic caliphate” under the banner of “remigration” as early as 2015.

Remigration is a sanitised word for the removal of populations, which is what the men with the inscribed rifles said when they were doing the dirty work in Serbia.

All of Europe?

None of this is new, and it was made plain while the explicit genociding was still going on. On 3 July 1995, days before Srebrenica, Jean Baudrillard wrote in Libération that “no one dares nor wants to step up to the final analysis” that the Serbs were “our objective allies in this cleansing operation for a future Europe, freed of its bothersome minorities,” and that from “a world perspective, we Westerners, we Europeans, are fighting exactly the same enemies as the Serbs are: Islam, the Muslims. Everywhere.”

Baudrillard was describing rather than applauding, and his “no one” was rhetorical even then, since Bosnians had been saying it into the void for three years. What has changed in 31 years is that the claim no longer needs a European theorist. Parties all over the EU say it themselves while targeting racialised people, and they are winning elections with it.

Read the condemnations that followed Mladić’s triumphalist burial. The European Commissioner for Enlargement cancelled a visit to Belgrade, writing that the glorification surrounding his death was incompatible with the values on which the EU path is built, which “requires confronting the past, genuine reconciliation and respecting victims of war crimes”.

I would ask which Europe(an) is being invoked. This is the union whose own review found indications that Israel had breached Article 2 of their association agreement, the clause making human rights an essential element of the treaty, whose Commission proposed suspending the trade provisions in September 2025, and which has still not assembled the majority to do it.

Berlin and Rome led the refusal, while 20 UN experts call full suspension a legal obligation rather than a political choice.

A visit to Belgrade can be cancelled within a week. A finding the union made about itself has waited more than a year for a vote. The condemnation is not exactly hypocrisy, but the logic recognising itself in a mirror and refusing to witness its reflection.

I have long asked how many people support a genocidal logic, but now I think the question is somewhat misleading. Counting supporters might be the wrong measure, because supporters would be nothing without the architecture which sustains the genocidal logic. It requires functionaries, a securitising vocabulary about identity and threat, and a large number of ‘ordinary’ people who would never attend such a funeral and who will find, when the moment comes, that they are not certain enough to say anything about it. That is perhaps an unwelcome answer, and it implicates Brussels as much as the crowd in Belgrade, differently.

May all the victims of this orchestrated genocide, and of every genocide still underway, have found peace, and may the hearts of their families and their loved ones be held in divine softness.

Rahmet dušama i pokoj svim žrtvama genocida.

Jasmin Emin Tabaković is an anthropologist at KU Leuven with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He writes on the intimate reverberations of genocidal violence and the search for healing amid its enduring forms, primarily among Bosnians.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.