Serbia would honour the man condemned for Srebrenica. The blood of the innocent speaks.

Ratko Mladic, former military chief of the Bosnian Serbs, died on Thursday 27 August 2026 in The Hague, where he was serving a life sentence for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The very next day, the Serbian justice minister announced on a local radio station that he would receive a funeral with « the military and state honours to which he is entitled ». Serbian officials are waiting for the authorities at The Hague to hand over the body before the funeral.

« It is certain that General Mladic will receive all the military and state honours to which he is entitled », the minister declared. « We are ready to go to The Hague as soon as we know what the next steps are. »

Mladic was held responsible for the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995: some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, who had taken refuge in an enclave the UN claimed to protect, were executed there under his command. The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 left nearly 100,000 dead and 2.2 million displaced. With Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic, he formed the trio that embodied the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Gravely ill for months, he died a few days after the international tribunal rejected the request of his family and the Serbian government to transfer him to a military hospital in Belgrade.

The blood of the innocent cries to heaven

Tradition knows no crime heavier than the murder of the defenceless just. From the first violent death in history, Scripture makes shed blood a voice that accuses: « the voice of thy brother's blood crieth to me from the earth » (Genesis 4:10). The Catechism of the Council of Trent, expounding the fifth commandment, ranks wilful murder among the sins that cry to God for vengeance, and teaches that no dignity nor reason of State excuses it. The execution of eight thousand unarmed men is no feat of arms: it is that sin, multiplied by eight thousand.

To crown with honours, or to name the evil

A nation remains free to bury its dead, and the Church herself prays for the departed, leaving to God alone the judgment of souls; we pronounce nothing on this man's lot before his Creator. But a funeral « with military and state honours » is not a prayer: these are public honours, and public honour declares a life worthy of example. To bestow the insignia of military glory on a man tried and condemned for the execution of thousands of the innocent is to call good what the law of God names evil. Scripture cursed this reversal in advance: « Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil » (Isaiah 5:20). The question is not whether a dead man may be buried; it is whether a State may decorate the blood it has not washed away.

What the faithful must hold

Blood that is shed is not settled by salvos of honour: it awaits the justice of God, which no earthly decoration suspends. The Christian's duty is neither hatred of the dead man nor festivity around his coffin, but the truth. To pray for the departed, to demand justice for the victims, to refuse that the man whom the fifth commandment condemns be rebaptised a hero. One may weep for a man; one may not honour his crime.

Sources. Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the fifth commandment; Genesis 4:10, the blood of Abel crying from the earth; Isaiah 5:20, « Vae qui dicitis malum bonum et bonum malum », according to the Vulgate.