A judgment and an accession path

In Belgrade, Serbian soldiers carried Ratko Mladic's coffin beneath the national flag after a government aircraft brought it from The Hague. AP's account places the state inside the ceremony: Justice Minister Nenad Vujic travelled with the family and had announced state honours. The argument over remembrance begins with those choices. A state lends its authority to a military past through the people it chooses to honour.[1]

The chronology matters. Mladic's forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995; his conviction followed in 2017. Serbia had begun EU accession negotiations in 2014. Those institutional paths overlapped, while parts of Serbia's public and political establishment continued to regard him as a hero. A judgment established criminal responsibility without producing a shared public memory of the war.[2]

The death that required a decision

Mladic's death on 27 August 2026 made that divergence actionable again. Decisions about transporting and burying his body gave the government an immediate choice about public honour. Marta Kos answered by cancelling her visit, explicitly invoking the values underpinning Serbia's EU path. The inherited dispute acquired a present consequence because state ceremony and accession diplomacy met at the funeral.[2]

There is a recent precedent: AP reports that Serbia gave convicted war criminal Nebojsa Pavkovic full military honours last year. This repeated choice suggests an official commemorative practice reaching beyond one family's arrangements. The strongest immediate explanation remains domestic politics: Vucic faces admirers who expect public respect. Yet the state supplies the aircraft, soldiers and honours through which that constituency's memory receives official standing.[1]

Whom the state chooses to honour

Vucic's response, as reported by AP, asked whether people should be prevented from attending or the funeral banned. That frames the choice around private mourning. The government's participation makes another choice visible: which honours public institutions confer. The distinction matters to victims, whose place in public memory is diminished when the authority that condemned a commander abroad is answered with honours at home.[1]

The decisive difference from the wartime past is institutional: the dispute now runs through a completed conviction, a public funeral and an accession relationship. Serbia's EU bid also faces democratic backsliding and its refusal to sanction Russia, AP reports. Funeral policy cannot explain that whole impasse. It does reveal how a state seeking membership continues to distribute public honour, and whether its institutions make room for the victims alongside the admirers.[1]