Honoring the ‘butcher of Bosnia’ would be a crude endorsement of genocide 

The death of General Radko Mladic is a reminder of the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust and the need to remember it. Unfortunately, the governments of the Bosnian Serb Republic and Serbia proper continue to deny what happened. 

The Serbian Minister of Justice announced that Mladic will be buried with the “highest military and state honors.” Dubbed “the butcher of Bosnia,” Mladic oversaw Serb military operations during the civil war of the early 1990s, including the July 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica.

Along with Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, he implemented a policy of ethnic cleansing — the removal of Muslims and Croats from land claimed by Serbs. Through rape, murder and brutality, the Bosnian Serb Army and paramilitary forces from Serbia drove thousands of people from their homes. Based on careful analysis of data, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia estimated the death toll at 89,186, of whom 57,922 were Bosnian Muslims, most of them civilians. 

Following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in December 1995, the tribunal pursued the perpetrators, especially the three Serbian leaders.

It indicted Milosevic in 1999 and began trying him in 2002 following his arrest in Serbia, but he died in 2006 before the tribunal could render a verdict. It convicted Karadzic of “genocide, crimes against humanity and........

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