Serbia’s celebrated war criminal

Serbia's capital of Belgrade put on quite the show yesterday (Monday).

After an 84-year-old's flag-draped coffin arrived home on a government jet, troops marched his body to St Luke's, weaving through large crowds schlepped into town on free buses. Top government ministers — plus an honour guard, three-volley salute, and military band — were there to bid him zbogom via Serbia's biggest public funeral in decades, with even Serbia's top Orthodox patriarch giving his blessing.

So the deceased must’ve been a great guy…?

Well (ahem) it was actually Ratko Mladić, the 'Butcher of Bosnia' who’d been serving life in The Hague for leading Europe's first genocide since WWII.

And all the pomp around his funeral might've just cost Serbia its EU dream.

Why?

First, the crime: as Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, Mladić orchestrated a campaign of ethnic-cleansing to carve out a 'greater Serbia', culminating in his brutal siege both of Bosnia's Sarajevo capital, while overrunning the UN's Srebrenica 'safe area': he reassured the town's mostly-Muslim refugees they’d go unharmed, but he then went and executed 8,000 men and boys over five days.

So... what's with Serbia’s hero treatment? That takes us to...

Second, the myth: many nationalist Serbs like to start the clock earlier with a highlight reel of Serb victimhood, first under the Ottoman empire then Croat fascists, until Yugoslavia's collapse risked stranding them as a minority in someone else's state. Against that backdrop, nationalists lionise Mladić as a defender, and skip his crimes via a mix of denial, gloss, and they-started-it (several Bosniak commanders also ended up in The Hague). But then...

Third, what's this got to do with the EU?

Serbia then spent 16 years pretending not to know where Mladić was hiding, even though he was getting schlepped to Belgrade football matches by state bodyguards, and paying weekend visits to his wife and kids.

As the bounties got higher (the US chipped in $5M) and his political protectors started losing power, Mladić's security got tighter. But in the end he got nabbed not by a bounty-hunter, but really by Brussels: the EU made clear that joining the bloc would mean handing him over, so in 2011, Serbian cops just followed Mladić's kids to a farm hideout where their old man was keeping bees!

After years of declining health, he died last month in a UN prison hospital in The Hague, still serving life for genocide.

But okay, then...

Fourth, why did Serbia just give him such a massive funeral?

Aleksandar Vučić, who has run Serbia since ~2012, is now walking a familiar line: he's terrified of alienating his own hardline base ahead of next month's elections.

But the EU is Serbia's biggest trade partner and official donor, with mere 'candidate status' enough to give foreign investors confidence. And yet while barely a ~third of voters now still even want to join the EU, ditching the bid altogether would not only cost him economically, but also politically (among Serbia's cities and youth).

And you can see that dilemma in the way Vučić just played Mladić's funeral: the president himself didn't attend, but everyone else did (including his own son); he insisted it was just a family-run affair, but it somehow got a state jet and full honour guard; he withheld official ‘state funeral’ status, but broadcast it live on state TV.

So...

Fifth, did Vučić's gambit work?

In Brussels, no. The EU's 'enlargement commissioner' (quite the title) flamed the whole spectacle as incompatible with European values and cancelled her scheduled visit, while other European capitals dunked on this insult to Mladić's many victims.

But the EU itself is caught in its own trap: it needs to keep dangling that sweet sweet membership carrot to pry Belgrade away from Moscow and keep the bloc's broader allure alive. And yet how much veneration of a genocidaire can a democratic bloc stomach, and at what point does all Serbia's nationalist pageantry just expose the hollowness of the entire candidate label?

Okay, but... did Vučić's gambit at least work at home in Belgrade? Well that's tbc — he literally just moved to call next month’s elections the same day as Mladić's funeral, presumably hoping for a nationalist bump in the polls.

And he'll need it — it depends which polls you want to believe, and who paid for them, but several suggest maybe he's no longer so untouchable.

Sound even smarter:

• Vučić was a cabinet minister under Slobodan Milošević, the nationalist president who ultimately died in The Hague while fighting charges of genocide in Bosnia, and various other crimes across Croatia and Kosovo.