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Crowds gathered in Belgrade on Monday morning ahead of the funeral of convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic, as Brussels accused officials of glorifying a man convicted of genocide during the 1990s war in Bosnia.
Mladic died in late August at age 84 while serving a life sentence in The Hague for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, leaving behind a brutal legacy that earned him the international nickname "Butcher of Bosnia."
He served as the military figurehead of the Bosnian Serb leadership alongside former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.
The United Nations war crimes court found him guilty of genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, where Bosnian Serb forces killed around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in a U.N.-protected safe zone.
He was also convicted of persecuting and forcibly expelling Bosnian Muslims and Croats, terrorizing civilians during the siege of Sarajevo, and taking U.N. peacekeepers hostage during NATO air strikes in 1995.
After evading justice for nearly 16 years following the war, Mladic was arrested in May 2011 in the Serbian village of Lazarevo, located near the northern city of Zrenjanin, before being transferred to The Hague.
His capture had long stood as one of the main conditions for Serbia’s progress toward European Union membership.
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