Former Bosnian Serb Ratko Mladic convicted of genocide dies aged 84

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general convicted of genocide for orchestrating the Srebrenica massacre during the Balkans wars of the 1990s has died in prison aged 84.

Mladic oversaw the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in a UN-designated “safe area” in the town in 1995.

Over a period of 10 days, his soldiers hunted them down before lining them up with their hands behind their backs and shooting them. Women were raped.

His actions led him to being called the “Butcher of Bosnia”.

Serb forces buried the remains, before digging them up and scattering them in distant mass graves in an organised effort to hide damning evidence of war crimes.

Mladic was also convicted of multiple crimes tied to the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, in which 10,000 people died, including 1,500 children.

He was captured in May 2011 in a village north of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, after almost 16 years on the run.

Mladic was sentenced to life in prison by the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2017.

The ruthless former communist officer-turned nationalist warlord, was one of the most notorious figures of the conflict that left more than 100,000 people dead and over a million homeless.

When the ethnic war in Bosnia started in 1992, Mladic became the commander of the Bosnian Serb troops and took control of large swathes of the country to form a Serb mini-state.

Serbs under his control laid siege to Sarajevo, and other cities and villages, established concentration camps for detained non-Serb civilians and enemy soldiers, and systematically killed prisoners.

But Mladic himself and his admirers among the Serbs have never repented. He was seen by many as a patriot fighting for the first pan-Serbian state.

Known for his obsession with his nation’s history, he saw Bosnia’s war as a chance for revenge against the conquest of Serbia centuries before by the Ottoman Empire.

He often referred to Bosnia’s Muslims as Turks and boasted of revenge when his troops overran the protected UN enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.

His lawyer says he died in a United Nations prison hospital in The Hague in the Netherlands, where had spent his last months, without giving any cause.