Ratko Mladic

Ratko Mladic commanded the Bosnian Serb army through the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica, spent sixteen years as a fugitive, and is serving a life sentence for genocide. He was a career officer of the Yugoslav People's Army whose father was killed by the Ustase when he was two. Given command of the Bosnian Serb forces in May 1992, he inherited most of the JNA's heavy weapons in the republic and used them to encircle Sarajevo for 1,425 days - the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare - during which some ten thousand people were killed by shelling and sniping, including approximately fifteen hundred children. In July 1995 his troops overran the United Nations safe area at Srebrenica, where Dutch peacekeepers stood aside, separated the men and boys from the women, and killed more than eight thousand of them over several days, burying them in graves that were later dug up and scattered to conceal the count. He was filmed in the town handing out sweets to children and promising safety. Indicted that year, he lived openly in Belgrade for a decade under army protection and was arrested in a cousin's house in 2011. The Hague convicted him in 2017 of genocide, extermination and persecution, and upheld it on appeal in 2021. Srebrenica is the only event in Europe since 1945 that an international court has called genocide. The identification of the dead from mixed and scattered graves took DNA work over two decades and is still incomplete; new burials take place at Potocari every July. Mladic's own daughter killed herself in 1994 with his pistol, and he has said publicly that he blames the war for it.

• Lived: 1942 CE – ?
• Nationality: Bosnian Serb
• Roles: military_leader