War criminal Ratko Mladic dubbed 'Butcher of Bosnia' dies in prison

The slaughter in Srebrenica is widely recognised as the worst case of ethnic cleansing to take place in Europe since the 1940s.

It was the brutal culmination of a war that had lasted over three years, in which the general pounded the besieged capital Sarajevo daily with the artillery, tanks, mortars and heavy machine guns of his nationalist Serb army, killing 10,000 people.

The son of a World War Two partisan fighter killed in 1945, Mladic was an officer in the old communist Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) when Yugoslavia's disintegration began in 1991.

When Bosnian Serbs rose in 1992 against Bosnia's Muslim-led secession, Mladic was picked to command the new Bosnian Serb army that swiftly overran 70 per cent of the landlocked country.

Dozens of towns were besieged with heavy weapons that once belonged to the JNA, and villages were burnt down as 22,000 troops of the UN Protection Force stood by more or less helplessly, with orders not to take sides.

A combination of Western pressure, covert American arms and training for Croats and Muslims gradually turned the tide against Mladic's army, with determined Nato strikes doing the rest.

The dead from Srebrenica were bulldozed into mass graves over four days in July 1995, some of them dug up and relocated to remote mountains so as to hide evidence of the killings.

The goal, as determined by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), was "ethnic cleansing", the forcible expulsion of Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs to clear Bosnian lands for a Greater Serbia.

The tribunal found that Mladic, together with late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, were part of a criminal conspiracy to implement the plan.

When he was sentenced to life in prison in 2017, Mladic shouted: "This is all lies, you are all liars!"

Karadzic, also convicted of genocide in 2016, and Mladic topped the ICTY wanted list for years after Western powers ended the war. But until Milosevic was toppled by a popular uprising in 2000, Mladic lived securely, if discreetly, in Belgrade.

Milosevic died in detention on March 11, 2006, a few months before a verdict in his four-year tribunal trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The army Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness and brutality in the Serb warrior tradition, once prized in the life-or-death partisan struggle against the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War Two.

In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water; were starved and raped in prison camps; were made to jump off a bridge and shot; and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas.

Munira Subasic, whose son and husband were killed by Bosnian Serb forces after they overran Srebrenica, said: "For me, Mladic is a symbol of all horrible crimes that happened during the war, our girls were raped, and boys killed, only because they were Muslim.

"Germans had Hitler, Serbs have Mladic. There is no difference between the two."

Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica to show him extolling his "lads" and haranguing Dutch UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands.

Srebrenica supposedly had "safe area" status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing.

Mladic said to the camera "We give this town to the Serb people as a gift," as he claimed the victory as revenge against Muslim Turks, who once held the area as part of the Ottoman Empire.

The next day, Mladic's forces were filmed handing out sweets to children, promising their safe passage while thousands of men and boys were being readied for execution.

When Nato tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited air strikes, his troops seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets.

In November 1996, Mladic and top generals gave in to strong Western pressure that he step down as ordered by Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic, who succeeded Karadzic and was later jailed for her role in war crimes.

When he was finally arrested in 2011, he put up no resistance.

His right arm was lame, the apparent result of an untreated stroke, looked nothing like the burly general in camouflage who ruffled the hair of a Srebrenica boy in 1995.

He suffered a heart attack in 2013 and seemed older than his years. By his own account, he felt like a frail old man.

In his few court appearances, he wavered between self-pity, smiling defiance and vague distraction.

"I am a very sick man," Mladic pleaded to the court.

In 2019, Mladic told the judges that he was too ill to participate in outdoor exercises and requested leave to visit the graves of family members in Serbia. The request was denied.

His appeal against conviction was rejected in 2021, as were repeated requests for his release on compassionate grounds.

In August 2026, a UN doctor found Mladic's death "may occur at any time," possibly within weeks, but his application for release was again rejected as not in the interests of justice.